QuoteProject
I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.
Oscar Wilde
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote humorously reflects the struggles of writing and the importance of punctuation.

This quote by Oscar Wilde illustrates the meticulous and often frustrating process of writing, particularly the role that punctuation plays in conveying meaning. It suggests that great care is taken to achieve clarity and precision in writing, often leading to a labor-intensive editing process that can feel trivial yet is crucial for effective communication.

Themes

WritingPunctuationEditingFrustrationHumor

In practice

Example use cases

In a writing workshop when discussing the challenges of editing.

More from Oscar Wilde

Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.
Oscar WildeRead
When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.
Oscar WildeRead
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
Oscar WildeRead
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
Oscar WildeRead
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
Oscar WildeRead

Similar quotes

This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Douglas AdamsRead
New Rule: Food companies must face the facts: One container equals one serving. Look, we’re Americans, and that means once we open the bag, there’s no stopping us until we’re licking stray bits of powdered cheese off the carpet. So stop trying to give us nutritional information based on a fraction of the package. It assumes a talent for two things that we’re really not capable of: restraint and math.
Bill MaherRead
I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
Alain De BottonRead
KILT, n. A costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen in America and Americans in Scotland.
Ambrose BierceRead
The same ten minutes that magazines urge me to use for sit-ups and triceps dips, I used for sobbing.
Tina FeyRead
Satire that the censor understands is rightly censored.
Karl KrausRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.