Lynne Truss quotes

The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.
-- Lynne Truss

#Stupid #Mean #Use

If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.
-- Lynne Truss

#Writing #Lightning #Good Food

The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.
-- Lynne Truss

#Way #Punctuation #Reason

A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. "Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife annual and tosses it over his shoulder. "I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up." The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.
-- Lynne Truss

#Confused #Black And White #Gun

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

#Taken #Oxford #People

The rule is: the word 'it's' (with apostrophe) stands for 'it is' or 'it has'. If the word does not stand for 'it is' or 'it has' then what you require is 'its'. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, 'Good food at it's best', you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.
-- Lynne Truss

#Writing #World #Matter

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

#Brother #Piano #Hands

Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.
-- Lynne Truss

#Men #Giving #Dinner

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

#Clever #Feelings #Matter

I mean, full stops are quite important, aren't they? Yet by contrast to the versatile apostrophe, they are stolid little chaps, to say the least. In fact one might dare to say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and yon, and succumbing to burn-out from all the thankless effort.
-- Lynne Truss

#Jobs #Mean #Effort

For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.
-- Lynne Truss

#Pain #Book #Emotional

We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.
-- Lynne Truss

#Thinking #Intellectual #Way

The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.
-- Lynne Truss

#Mean #People #Political

Offence is so easily given. And where the 'minority' issue is involved, the rules seem to shift about: most of the time a person who is female/black/disabled/gay wants this not to be their defining characteristic; you are supposed to be blind to it. But then, on other occasions, you are supposed to observe special sensitivity, or show special respect.
-- Lynne Truss

#Gay #Issues #Black

...when a phone call competes for attention with a real-world conversation, it wins. Everyone knows the distinctive high-and-dry feeling of being abandoned for a phone call, and of having to compensate - with quite elaborate behaviours = for the sudden half-disappearance of the person we were just speaking to. 'Go ahead!' we say. 'Don't mind us! Oh look, here's a magazine I can read!' When the call is over, other rituals come into play, to minimise the disruption caused and to restore good feeling.
-- Lynne Truss

#Real #Winning #Play

Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social 'group' focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon.
-- Lynne Truss

#Simple #Skills #Icons

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

#Communication #Texting #Care

The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.
-- Lynne Truss

#Way #Arbitrary #Vapour

Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person.
-- Lynne Truss

#Imagination #Manners #Persons

Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.
-- Lynne Truss

#Thinking #Causes #Punctuation

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

#Book #Errors #Hands

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

#Communication #Mean #Texting

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

#Squares #Names #Shapes

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

#Jobs #Years #Black

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

#Views #Causes #Common

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

#Mistake #People #Freak

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

#End Of The World #Use #Alarmists

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

#Home #People #Gone

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

#Children #Book #People

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

#Character #Judging #Details

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

#Challenges #World #Favorites Things

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

#Hate #Eye #People

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

#People #Giving #Horror

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

#Personality #Comes And Goes #Defects

You don't want to make an enemy of Piers Morgan.
-- Lynne Truss

#Enemy #Piers #Want

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

#Book #People #Giving

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

#Dad #Eggs #People

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

#Thinking #People #Atrocities

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

#Nice #Fall #Clothes

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

#Mean #Choices #Brain

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

#Drama #Ideas #People

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

#Imagination #Together #Mystery

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

#Sorry #Laughing #Comedian

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

#Years #Important

To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday" (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's" (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler.
-- Lynne Truss

#Friday #Writing #Average

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

#Expression #People #Ears

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

#Gold #Bows #Levels

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

#Couple #People #Would Be

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

#Roots #Drawing #Way

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

#Book #Journey #Voice

Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.
-- Lynne Truss

#Black And White #Mammals #Pandas

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

#Detours #Language #Punctuation

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

#Reading #Phones #Ipods

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

#Home #Cat #Advantage

Do you lend books and DVDs to people? If so, don't you always regret it? All my life I have forced books on to people who have subsequently forgotten all about it. Meanwhile, on my shelves sit many orphaned books loaned to me over the years by trusting, innocent souls - some as long ago as the Seventies.
-- Lynne Truss

#Regret #Book #Dvds

As someone who sends texts messages more or less non-stop, I enjoy one particular aspect of texting more than anything else: that it is possible to sit in a crowded railway carriage laboriously spelling out quite long words in full, and using an enormous amount of punctuation, without anyone being aware of how outrageously subversive I am being.
-- Lynne Truss

#Long #Texting #Messages

Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.
-- Lynne Truss

#Stories #Helping #Punctuation

Don't pessimism and caution naturally go hand in hand?
-- Lynne Truss

#Hands #Pessimism #Caution

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

#Jobs #Editing #Years

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

#Lovely #Email #Saying Hello

Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas?
-- Lynne Truss

#Wings #Protection #Militant