When you first met him you couldn't believe he was the editor of The New Yorker and afterwards you couldn't believe that anyone else could have been. The main thing he was interested in was clarity ... he was a purist and perfectionist and it had a tremendous effect on all of us: it kept us from being sloppy. When I first met him he asked me if I knew English. I thought he meant French or a foreign language. But he repeated, "Do you know English?" When I said I did he replied, "Goddamn it, nobody knows English." As Andy White mentioned in his obituary, Ross approached the English sentence as though it was an enemy, something that was going to throw him. He used to fuss for an hour over a comma. He'd call me in for lengthy discussions about the Thurber colon. And as for poetic license, he'd say, "Damn any license to get things wrong."
- James Thurber on New Yorker founding editor Harold Ross, as interviewed by George Plimpton and Max Steele in the Fall 1955 issue of The Paris Review
