Proofreading Quotes

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I work in my study, taking the collections of words that people send me and making small adjustments to them, changing something here and there, checking everything is in order and putting a part of myself into the text by introducing just a little bit of difference. ("Substitutions")”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Best New Horror 22

“Read your paper backward, sentence by sentence, as a final proofreading step. This technique isolates each sentence and makes it easier to spot errors you may have overlooked in previous readings.”
― Claire B. May Gordon S. May

“Muphry’s Law: “If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“And then Robinson Crusoe stripped naked, swam out to his ship, filled his pockets with biscuits, and swam back to shore...."

"What?" I said, hefting my pack and frowning at the child.

"Nothing," she said, getting to her feet. "Just an old preHegira book that Uncle Martin used to read to me. He used to say that proofreaders have always been incompetent assholes-even 1400 years ago.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“Self publishing' is not as easy as it is portrayed! When you think you have finished your book, proof read, proof read again, and again, and again. Don't believe it is ready until you have a hard copy proofed!”
― Phil Simpkin

“one of the mugs, robin saw, read keep clam and proofread”
― Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

“Good first impressions....are good for business.”
― CS-Edit

“I'd forgotten - perhaps preferred to forget - that I'd caved in to the interference of some copy-editor... somebody anonymous whose commitment to finding something wrong would not disgrace an Eastern European clerk.”
― Ramsey Campbell The Hungry Moon

“A book's never gonna be perfect, but then the Romans believed perfection angered the gods.”
― Melvyn Small

“Connie's other job was proof-editing which she did very badly. Transferring the author's corrections to a clean sheet of proofs was something Connie was unable to do without missing an average of three corrections a page, or transcribing newly inserted material all wrong... she put angry authors' letters about the mutilation of their books under the cushion of her chair to deal with later”
― Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington

“All writing is guilty until proven innocent.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“[B]ut newspapers nowadays had too many pages, no one could proof everything before it went to press, and even the major newspapers were now writing “Simone de Beauvoire,” or “Beaudelaire,” or “Roosvelt,” and the proofreader was becoming as outmoded as the Gutenberg press.”
― Umberto Eco, Numero zero

“The story of a man's life, especially when it is told by the man himself, should not be interrupted by the hecklings of an editor.”
― John C. Van Dyke, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie: With The Gospel of Wealth

“a leather cuirass of boiled leather”
― John Gwynne, Valor

“Anatomy of Typos (Sonnet)

It took me a 100 books to realize this,
typos are not a stain upon literature,
typos are ornament of literature,
sweet reminders of human endeavor.

It's great to have literature without typos,
like it's great to have a life without regrets.
But in actuality, only the dead have no regrets,
only the uncreative make no typographical mistakes.

There are typos that are grievous, hence,
need correcting, but most typos are harmless.
Repulsed by typos means repulsed by literature,
repulsed by regrets means repulsed by existence.

Typos are the ornament of literature,
regrets are the ornament of life.
To make peace with regrets is the beginning of life,
to make peace with typos is to empower literary light.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The God Sonnets: Naskar Art of Theology

“Typos are not a stain upon literature, typos are ornament of literature.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The God Sonnets: Naskar Art of Theology