Lynne Truss Quotes

A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.

I don't like the way question marks look. They're really ugly. They look like blots. At some other point in my life, I might have disliked them because I never knew how to properly apply them. Also commas, and whether they were outside the quote or inside the quote - that all seemed like an unnecessary pain in the ass.

[Late-night host] is not really a job for a woman. You can't have kids and be a late-night host.I mean Samantha Bee has children, but you're there all day and all night. No one has a life outside of it. I would never try to have a family. I care much more about a career anyway, than having a family, so that's my own prerogative. It's just not something that a woman.

I work through life with commas. I don't even know, do you have parentheticals?

Punctuation, is? fun!

The best way to improve economic prospects for women is to improve job prospects for the men in their lives, even if that means increasing the so-called pay gap.

In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.

I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men-white male corporate society. So why wouldnt a woman want to rebel against that?

It is ridiculous to take on a man's job just in order to be able to say that 'a woman has done it - yah!' The only decent reason for tackling a job is that it is your job and you want to do it.

I'm not for women, frankly, in any job. I don't want any of them around. Thank God we don't have any in the Cabinet.

Starting is hard so I really need to give myself permission to do a bad job. I always give myself leave to write total nonsense for as long as I need to release the pressure, because it's really hard to start if you feel like that first sentence you write has to actually mean something.

It is well known that you can only manage what you measure, and as this is the job of professional accountants, it means they have huge influence on companies' governance.

I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?

I take my job seriously, which means I'm going to need to get acquainted with the subject matter on a personal level.

If you look at the offense like a fancy car, the offensive line is the engine. Even though we might have nice spinners and nice rims and tinted windows and some neat paint job, it doesn't mean crap without the engine. If the engine's not working, the car might look like a pretty nice car, but it's a piece of crap.

Why do we resist giving help to homeless men? In part because we don't understand how our pressure on men to support families often forces men to take transient jobs that are but a step away from homelessness (the death-of-a-salesman jobs, the migrant worker jobs...) and in part because we respond differently to men who fail [than women who fail].

"After all, golf is only a game", said Millicent. Women say these things without thinking. It does not mean that there is any kink in their character. They simply don't realise what they are saying.

This statement, this transgression, this issue whereas if you look at the Fox News poll - CNN, ABC, NBC, everybody was there."CBS" polls, you see that Americans were very focused on jobs and the economy, health care, immigration, terrorism. I mean, the cues and clues to this election were right in front of him the whole time.

It's very hard to get people, because it's just one of those things. I mean, everybody is working. And then during the off- season, it's easy, but we don't have the people during the off-season, because the club closes during off-season, so lot of people don't want a part-time job.

That's the thing that always stuck out to me - the idea that quantity becomes quality. I always took it to mean if you do anything enough, if you keep putting effort in, eventually something will happen, with or without you. You don't have to have faith when you start out, you just have to dedicate yourself to practice as if you have it.

Change is healthy and useful. It has to be fought for most of the time. It's not inevitable. It takes real leadership and real effort. But I think it's really important not to take yourself too seriously. Dwight Eisenhower used to have a rule that you should always take your job seriously but not yourself.

Really do a job and do it well.

All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout-nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be controlled and initiated by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I'll remain a member of the loyal opposition.

Friendship is a full-time job.

That's because of everything the public interest and the media interest is focused on: What did Donald Trump know and when did he know it? Whether there was cooperation with the Russians. I don't mean to say that's a distraction or we shouldn't follow it up. But the underlying story of the Russians trying to subvert our democracy, both through propaganda, planted stories, manipulation of social media and through direct efforts to infiltrate our state election system, is really an enormously significant event. And it's not over.