Quote

In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.

Russell Baker

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Russell Baker
Age: 93 †
Born: 1925
Born: August 14
Died: 2019
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Journalist
Writer
Morrisonville
Virginia
Russell Wayne Baker
Play
Role
Writing
Reader
Way
Roles
Hear
Heard
Punctuation
Language
Readers
Helping
Plays
Body
Helps

More quotes by Russell Baker

Image
In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.
Russell Baker
Image
Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother.
Russell Baker
Image
Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.
Russell Baker
Image
Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on 'canned' laughter, grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.
Russell Baker
Image
After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of cliches.
Russell Baker
Image
Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.
Russell Baker
Image
What [man landing on the moon] is doing up there is indulging his obsession with the impossible. The impossible infuriates and tantalizes him. Show him an impossible job and he will reduce it to a possibility so trite that eventually it bores him.
Russell Baker
Image
A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a 'Dear Murph' letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan's father in a film.
Russell Baker
Image
You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
Russell Baker
Image
The early commentators who put down the pre-presidential Roosevelt as an empty-headed young lightweight, all ambition and no talent, now seem comically wrong to a modern book-reading, movie-going, television-watching, legend-loving American public conditioned to think of him as one of the presidential giants on the order of Washington and Lincoln.
Russell Baker
Image
Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
Russell Baker
Image
It is safest to shut up and pay, which is what I shall eventually do, though I shall hate having to sell the children.
Russell Baker
Image
There's so much spectating going on that a lot of us never get around to living.
Russell Baker
Image
Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T.
Russell Baker
Image
Journalist: A person with nothing on his mind and the power to express it.
Russell Baker
Image
Sending grown-ups up the wall is one of the things adolescence is all about. A few years ago it was done with rock 'n' roll music. Now at least they can do it quietly with a home computer.
Russell Baker
Image
The Government cannot afford to have a country made up entirely of rich people, because rich people pay so little tax that the Government would quickly go bankrupt. This is why Government men always tell us that labor is man's noblest calling. Government needs labor to pay its upkeep.
Russell Baker
Image
Goat cheese... produced a bizarre eating era when sensible people insisted that this miserable cheese produced by these miserable creatures reared on miserable hardscrabble earth was actually superior to the magnificent creamy cheeses of the noblest dairy animals bred in the richest green valleys of the earth.
Russell Baker
Image
Ireland really is my problem the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society now is
Russell Baker
Image
Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated the lesson of history.
Russell Baker