"What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surrender."
— Terry Jones

"This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as non-traditional gramar, split infinitives, and the odd wank."
— Christopher Moore (Fool: A Novel)

"What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?"
— Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)

"The Grocery Checkout Proviso: The more things you care about, the more vulnerable you are. If you are part of that epicurean minority in this country that is still offended by violations of the English language, you will be slapped in the face every time you stand in line at the market. FIFTEEN ITEMS OR LESS. Caring passionately about grammar—caring passionately about anything most of humanity doesn’t care about—is like poking a giant hole in your life and letting the wind blow everything around."
— Rachel Kadish (Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story)

"In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable about, SNOOTs’ attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives’ attitudes about contemporary culture. We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs’ importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely manhandled and corrupted by supposedly educated people. The Evil is all around us: boners and clunkers and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that make any SNOOT’s cheek twitch and forehead darken. A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people’s English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails: We are the Few, the Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else."
— David Foster Wallace (Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays)

"It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening.

If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters."
— Lemony Snicket (The Bad Beginning)

"[M]y favorite teacher. . . . was explaining that you don't say but however . . . . These are pleonasms. . . . the use of more words than necessary to express an idea. . . .There are times in life that are very 'but however.'"
— Stefano Benni (Margherita Dolce Vita)

""And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged.""
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it."
— Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)

"Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put."
— Winston Churchill

"A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail."
— Ben Marcus (Notable American Women)

"'I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar.'
'It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.'"
— Dorothy Sayers Gaudy Night

"Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday."
— Mark Twain (Roughing It)

"People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else."
— B.R. Myers

"We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this was not to begin a sentence with And. I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with And, but I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible at that time."
— Stephen W. Hawking (Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays)

"I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say hoi polloi, never "the hoi polloi," because hoi meant "the," and two "the's" were redundant -- indeed something only hoi polloi would say."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)