Lynne Truss Quotes

#1. The rule is: don't use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.

Lynne Truss

#2. The idea of withholding a massive secret is obviously quite exciting to some people. It is also the basis of much classic drama, of course, from Sophocles onwards.

Lynne Truss

#3. As we shall see, the tractable apostrophe has always done its proper jobs in our language with enthusiasm and elegance, but it has never been taken seriously enough; its talent for adaptability has been cruelly taken for granted; and now, in an age of supreme graphic frivolity, we pay the price.

Lynne Truss

#4. I am not against marriage. I lived with someone for 11 years. But we weren't in love, and I thought that was quite important.

Lynne Truss

#5. Sticklers unite, you have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion, and arguably you didn't have a lot of that to begin with.

Lynne Truss

#6. That man was Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450-1515) and I will happily admit I hadn't heard of him until about a year ago, but am now absolutely kicking myself that I never volunteered to have his babies.

Lynne Truss

#7. On the page, punctuation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of the reader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to hum the tune.

Lynne Truss

#8. Using the comma well announces that you have an ear for sense and rhythm, confidence in your style and a proper respect for your reader,

Lynne Truss

#9. It used to be just CIA agents with ear-pieces who walked round with preoccupied, faraway expressions, and consequently regarded all the little people as irrelevant scum. Now, understandably, it's nearly everybody.

Lynne Truss

#10. Oh, the illusion of choice in the modern world - don't get me started. But don't you agree that the Internet has softened our brains and made us forget that 'choice' used to mean something different from selecting options from menus?

Lynne Truss

#11. Remember that thing Truman Capote said years ago about Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing"? I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn't writing, and doesn't even qualify as typing either: it's just sending.

Lynne Truss

#12. If colons and semicolons give themselves airs and graces, at least they also confer airs and graces that the language would be lost without.

Lynne Truss

#13. After university, I got a job sub-editing and for years I was a literary editor.

Lynne Truss

#14. What I have always liked about Brighton is its impersonality. Since the 18th century, people have come, used the place and gone home again.

Lynne Truss

#15. Evidently an A level in English is a sacred trust, like something out of "The Lord of the Rings". You must go forth with your A level and protect the English language with your bow of elfin gold.

Lynne Truss

#16. No one else understands us 7th sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes, we are often aggressively instructed to 'get a life' by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.

Lynne Truss

#17. In my worst moments, I think the biggest effect of 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' was to kill the happiness of people who had previously skipped through life, unaware of all the atrocities lurking in the world around them.

Lynne Truss

#18. If we looked inside ourselves and remembered how insignificant we are, just for a couple of minutes a day, respect for other people would be an automatic result.

Lynne Truss

#19. What one discovers in life, I find, is that one's personality defects don't come and go.

Lynne Truss

#20. you know those self-help books that give you permission to love yourself? This one gives you permission to love punctuation.

Lynne Truss

#21. We may curse our bad luck that it's sounds like its; who's sounds like whose; they're sounds like their (and their); there's sounds like theirs; and you're sounds like your. But if we are grown-ups who have been through full-time education, we have no excuse for muddling them up.

Lynne Truss

#22. Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.

Lynne Truss

#23. Don't pessimism and caution naturally go hand in hand?

Lynne Truss

#24. Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.

Lynne Truss

#25. I do needlepoint from kits. I give them as gifts to people in the form of cushion covers and they are often speechless with horror.

Lynne Truss

#26. The main advantage of working at home is that you get to find out what cats really do all day.

Lynne Truss

#27. Texting is a supremely secretive medium of communication - it's like passing a note - and this means we should be very careful what we use it for.

Lynne Truss

#28. there used to be a shopkeeper in Bristol who deliberately stuck ungrammatical signs in his window as a ruse to draw people into the shop; they would come in to complain, and he would then talk them into buying something.

Lynne Truss

#29. Sticklers never read a book without a pencil at hand, to correct the typographical errors. In short, we are unattractive know-all obsessives who get things out of proportion and are in continual peril of being disowned by our exasperated families.

Lynne Truss

#30. You don't want to make an enemy of Piers Morgan.

Lynne Truss

#31. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it usually aspiring gangsta rappers who set such store by designer labels?

Lynne Truss

#32. As with email, the recipient of a texted question seems to have the option to ignore it, while nevertheless saying, 'Hello, lovely day,' and so on.

Lynne Truss

#33. To some people, the fact that I am not married, or don't have children, would be the reason I have written a book on punctuation.

Lynne Truss

#34. I hate to be treated as if I'm invisible. I get incensed when people talk across me or refuse to catch my eye in a restaurant or shop.

Lynne Truss

#35. Pretentious and over-active semicolons have reached epidemic proportions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought.

Lynne Truss

#36. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.

Lynne Truss

#37. Writers and painters alike are in the business of consulting their own imaginations, and stimulating the imaginations of others. Together, and separately, they celebrate the absolute mystery of otherness.

Lynne Truss

#38. My favorite thing in the world is a quiz show, 'University Challenge,' so you can see what kind of sad person I am.

Lynne Truss

#39. Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point.

Lynne Truss

#40. I recently heard of someone studying the ellipsis (or three dots) for a PhD. And, I have to say, I was horrified. The ellipsis is the black hole of the punctuation universe, surely, into which no right-minded person would willingly be sucked, for three years, with no guarantee of a job at the end.

Lynne Truss

#41. Jessie had never heard you could inherit madness. She thought madness was something that just happened to people in Shakespeare when the wind got up.

Lynne Truss

#42. All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatemala.

Lynne Truss

#43. I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, I should have used fewer semicolons

Lynne Truss

#44. She was one of those invalids who has to lie down a lot, and sometimes can't lift a bread knife, but can shift a mahogany wardrobe if the fancy is upon her to see it in a different place.

Lynne Truss

#45. All the important roles shortly boiled down to one: remember your with other people; show some consideration.

Lynne Truss

#46. One moment you can say the words 'I am'. And the next, you have no first person, no present tense, and no entitlement, as a subject, to act on verbs of any kind.

Lynne Truss

#47. Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person.

Lynne Truss

#48. Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas?

Lynne Truss

#49. Brackets come in various shapes, types and names:
1 round brackets (which we call brackets, and the Americans call parentheses)
2 square brackets [which we call square brackets, and the Americans call brackets]

Lynne Truss

#50. The advent of the mobile phone was a disaster. We are forced to listen, open-mouthed, to other people's intimate conversations. Increasingly, we are all in our virtual bubbles when we are out in public, whether we are texting, listening to iPods, reading or just staring dangerously at other people.

Lynne Truss

#51. Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word "punctilious" ("attentive to formality or etiquette") comes from the same original root as punctuation.

Lynne Truss

#52. Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, "The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition.

Lynne Truss

#53. One of the things that all authors of fiction must learn to judge is whether - and in what detail - to describe the face of a character.

Lynne Truss

#54. There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and those who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.

Lynne Truss

#55. I think about death sometimes. Analytically, of course.

Lynne Truss

#56. What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?

Lynne Truss

#57. Texting is a fundamentally sneaky form of communication, which we should despise, but it is such a boon we don't care. We are all sneaks now.

Lynne Truss

#58. When you by nature subscribe to the view that everyone except yourself is a berk or a wanker, it is hard to bond with anybody in any rational common cause.

Lynne Truss

#59. To those of us accustomed to newspaper headlines, 'PIZZAS' in inverted commas suggests these might be pizzas, but nobody's promising anything, and if they turn out to be cardboard with a bit of cheese on top, you can't say you weren't warned.

Lynne Truss

#60. Old radio comedy makes me laugh, as well as 'I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue' and comedians like Paul Merton.

Lynne Truss

#61. The way people behave towards each other is a measure of their value as human beings.

Lynne Truss

#62. is only one thing more mortifying than having an exclamation mark removed by an editor: an exclamation mark added in.

Lynne Truss

#63. You should read Wodehouse when you're well and when you're poorly;when you're travelling, and when you're not;when you're feeling clever, and when you're feeling utterly dim. Wodehouse always lifts your spirits,no matter how high they happen to be already.

Lynne Truss

#64. In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.

Lynne Truss

#65. No valentines from the cats again.

Lynne Truss

#66. I used to help my dad with a stall selling eggs when I was about 12. People were so hard up they would ask for one egg. But mostly no one came by at all. It was very demoralising.

Lynne Truss

#67. In her autobiographical Giving Up the Ghost (2003), Hilary Mantel reveals: I have always been addicted to something or other, usually something there's no support group for. Semicolons, for instance, I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time.

Lynne Truss

#68. I apologise if you all know this, but the point is many, many people do not. Why else would they open a large play area for children, hang up a sign saying "Giant Kid's Playground", and then wonder why everyone says away from it? (Answer: everyone is scared of the Giant Kid.)

Lynne Truss

#69. We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.

Lynne Truss

#70. Nice clothes fall apart. Nice clocks don't work. Bits fall off the nice cooker. It is hard to accept that pricing is unrelated to quality, but it's plainly true. Nowadays, we pay the price that satisfies our particular personality type; and then we live with the painful consequences.

Lynne Truss