Quotes from Lynne Truss

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

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.

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.

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.

intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability 'to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly'. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if you need a new and unfamiliar VCR programmed in a hurry, you commandeer any small passing child to do it.

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.

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.

If there is one lesson to be learned from this book, it is that there is never a dull moment in the world of punctuation.

the Law of Conservation of Apostrophes. A heresy since the 13th century, this law states that a balance exists in nature: "For every apostrophe omitted from an it's, there is an extra one put into an its." Thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant, even if this means we have double the reason to go and bang our heads against a wall.

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

As with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved , incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to deliver the closing one. The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it's like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in the bath during the interval. It's just not cricket.

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 burnout from all the thankless effort.

semicolons are dangerously habit-forming. Many writers hooked on semicolons become an embarrassment to their families and friends.

I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, "I should have used fewer semicolons" – and although I have spent months fruitlessly trying to track down the chap responsible, I believe it none the less. If it turns out that no one actually did say this on their deathbed, I shall certainly save it up for my own.

nothing is straightforward in the world of literary taste.

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.

There is even a rather delightful publication for children called The Punctuation Repair Kit, which takes the line Hey! It's uncool to be stupid! - which is a lie, of course, but you have to admire them for trying.

I'm sure people did question whether Italian printers were quite the right people to legislate on the meaning of everything; but on the other hand, resistance was obviously useless against a family that could invent italics.

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

humorous writing, the exclamation mark is the equivalent of canned laughter (F. Scott Fitzgerald – that well-known knockabout gag-man – said it was like laughing at your own jokes)

Writers jealous of their individual style are obliged to wring the utmost effect from a tiny range of marks – which explains why they get so desperate when their choices are challenged (or corrected) by copy-editors legislating according to a "house style".

So the particular strengths of the colon are beginning to become clear. A colon is nearly always preceded by a complete sentence, and in its simplest usage it rather theatrically announces what is to come. Like a well-trained magician's assistant, it pauses slightly to give you time to get a bit worried, and then efficiently whisks away the cloth and reveals the trick complete.

Punctuation is no more a class issue than the air we breathe.

L'insulto é l'arma del debole.