Interviewer: To what do you attribute your success as a writer?
Wilson: To the use of the periodic sentence.
Interviewer: Surely that is not the whole story.
Wilson: And to my use of the colon and the semi-colon. Writing so long for the New Yorker may have led me a little to overdo the comma.
Interviewer: What else?
Wilson: My invariable habit of writing in pencil on those "legal-size" yellow pads -- the kind that are ruled with blue lines. I believe that composing on the typewriter has probably done more than anything else to deteriorate English prose.
"An Interview with Edmund Wilson" (1962)
