Lynne Truss Quotes

I like all things grammatical, and I had already written several books about parts of speech, and even the alphabet, so everything that makes up a sentence and even a word was covered except for punctuation.

In my experience, copy editors, like the stalwart staff I've worked with and learned from in my 34 years at 'TIME,' are linguistic conservatives - the keepers of the flame ignited by the Strunk-White 'Elements of Style,' published in full in 1957 and chosen by 'TIME' as one of the 100 most influential nonfiction books of the past century.

I'm pretty sure when I need a comma; I'm not so sure about a semicolon.

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.

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.

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'd rather fiddle with my phone for precious seconds than neglect an apostrophe; I'd rather insert a word laboriously keyed out than resort to predictive texting for a - acceptable to some - synonym.

It's always nice to end your sentences with an exclamation mark, and not a comma.

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

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

I have been fighting over commas all my life.

I am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

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

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.

I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.

One thing that drives me nuts... well, let me ask you, when writers write do they not use quotation marks anymore?

I think that I speak a lot like I write.

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.

Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.

Nothin'g sa'ys q'uality fantas'y l'ike misuse'd apos'tro'phes.

Punctuation, is? fun!

When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

I might not use capital letters. But I would definitely use an apostrophe…and probably a period. I’m a huge fan of punctuation.