Famous Authors on Grammar

Guest post by Erinn Stam.

Not all writers have a firm grasp of grammar — that’s why there are editors. But most writers do have plenty of opinions about the role of grammar in language and writing. Here are some of the best quotes from famous writers about grammar:

• “Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.” ~ Joan Didion
• “Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.” ~ Moliere
• “I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.” ~ Louis Aragon
• “I don’t know the rules of grammar… If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.” ~ David Ogilvy
• “The greater part of the worlds’ troubles are due to questions of grammar.” ~ Michel de Montaigne
• “Grammar is the grave of letters.” ~ Elbert Hubbard
• “It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.” ~ William Somerset Maugham
• “Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.” ~ E.B. White
• “When a thought takes one’s breath away, a grammar lesson seems an impertinence.” ~ Thomas W. Higginson
• “The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
• “Like everything metaphysical, the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.” ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.” ~ Robert Frost
• “Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.” ~ E.B. White
• “Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.” ~ Mark Twain
• “My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
• “No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.” ~ Isaac Babel
• “Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.” ~ Lewis Thomas
• “When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
• “Ignorant people think it’s the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it’s the sickening grammar they use.” ~ Mark Twain
• “I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horror of sordid passion and — if he’s lucky enough — know the love of an honest woman.” ~ Robert Graves
• “GRAMMAR, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet of the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.” ~ Ambrose Bierce
• “My spelling is Wobbly.  It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.”  ~A.A. Milne
• “Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays.”  ~George Eliot

  “Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.”  ~Richard C. Trench

• “Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.”  ~William Safire
• “Here is a lesson in writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Every author’s attitudes towards style are as different as his or her own writing style. What is your personal take on the role of grammar? With which authors do you most agree or disagree? Why?

Bio:

Erinn Stam is the Managing Editor for a nursing scholarship website. She attends Wake Technical Community College and is learning about scholarships for lpn. She lives in Durham, NC with her lovely 4-year-old daughter and exuberant husband.