Quotes About Semicolons

#1. You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.

George Bernard Shaw

#2. 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

#3. The dash helps to indicate that the two thoughts are intimately related, and it's less stodgy than a semicolon, which would have performed the same function (and who talks in semicolons?).

Bill Walsh

#4. I hope that my ideas attract a lively dialogue, even if my sentences are simple. Simple sentences have always served me well. And I don't use semicolons. It's hard to read anyway, especially for high school kids. Also, I avoid irony, too. I don't like people saying one thing and meaning the other.

Kurt Vonnegut

#5. How come you never use semicolons?" she'll say. Or: "How come you chop it all up into little sections instead of letting it flow and flow?" That sort of thing.

Kurt Vonnegut

#6. To one who has enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any hour, what thoughts can be recorded about it seem like the commas and semicolons in the paragraph-mere stops.

Margaret Fuller

#7. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after "semicolons," and another one after "now." And

Ursula K. Le Guin

#8. Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty points off the TomJones Index.

Jasper Fforde

#9. Great. They fucked with my punctuation?" "Pam says you're overly fond of semicolons.

M. Pierce

#10. He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James.
"No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.

George Eliot

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

Lynne Truss

#12. Writing is new, relatively speaking. Story telling is ancient. Tell your story first putting aside all other worries. Leave fretting over homonyms, semicolons, and Oxford commas to editors and friends you can be bribe with baking.

Ada Maria Soto

#13. In the long sentences of the president's message, semicolons followed by "yet" or "but" separated clauses that balanced each side of an issue, reflecting Roosevelt's characteristic "on the one hand, on the other" style of crediting antagonistic views.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#14. 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

#15. Semicolons ... signal, rather than shout, a relationship ... A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don't have to draw you a picture; a hint will do."

George Will

#16. Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum:one No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly. Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it.

Richard Hugo

#17. Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don't do anything, don't suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.

Kurt Vonnegut

#18. 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

#19. The one critisism the author of Slaugherhouse-Five would make of the young writer was what he called a punctuation problem. Mr. Vonnegut didn't like all the semicolons. 'People will probably figure out that you went to college
you don't have to try to prove it to them,' he told Danny.

John Irving

#20. I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc.

John Clare

#21. No one knows what they are anymore," he says. "If you're not in the habit of reading nineteenth-century novels, you think that the author has killed a fruit fly directly above a comma - semicolons have become nothing but a distraction.

John Irving

#22. I remember the rule for semicolons; the sentences on both sides have to be full ones.

Hugh Howey

#23. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#24. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.

George Eliot

#25. Overall, she seemed to be going for a sort of mid-'80s postapocalyptic cyberpunk girl-next-door look. And it was working for me, in a big way. In a word: hot.

Ernest Cline

#26. His name is Nick. I love it. It makes him seem nice, and regular, which he is. When he tells me his name, I say, "Now, that's a real name." He brightens and reels off some line: "Nick's the kind of guy you can drink a beer with, the kind of guy who doesn't mind if you puke in his car. Nick!" He

Gillian Flynn

#27. Do you realize what would happen if Moses were alive today? He'd go up to Mount Sinai, come back with the Ten Commandments, and spend the next eight years trying to get published.

Robert Orben

#28. As far as the style, I can't say there is one definite style. I probably feel most comfortable writing in a tonal idiom, with considerable, if not extreme chromaticism.

Marc-Andre Hamelin

#29. Whenever I made money I invested in myself ... I bought whatever I needed to make my career better. I never really spent money on other stuff, like buying expensive cars.

Tiesto

#30. Lust fades after climax, love lasts until breakfast!

Tom Conrad

#31. In theory, it makes a lot of sense to combine the two operations, especially on the back end. But merging the two actual portal consumer experiences into a unified site will be a nightmare.

Charlene Li

#32. Living in LA is like not having a date on Saturday night.

Candice Bergen

#33. We remember a few people who've been enlightened. We build churches and edifices in their name. But few people, if any, feel that they could ever be like that; and if that's how they feel - that's how it will be.

Frederick Lenz

#34. The lessons of experience are always learned too late.

George Sand

#35. If anyone doubts the influence of drug company ads on patients and physicians - consider all those wasted billions of dollars for a pill that sells for more than six times as much as another drug that does the same thing, made by the same company.

Robert Bazell

#36. You have very little morally persuasive power with people who can feel your underlying contempt.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#37. A life without risk is one where I tell myself I'm not worthy of taking a chance.

Courtney Milan

#38. No square shall enter in the circle of winners

Curren$y

#39. Wisdom is having things right in your life
and knowing why.

William Stafford