Quotes from Lynne Truss

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

As we shall see, the tractable apostrophe has always done its proper jobs in our language with enthusiasm and elegance, but it has never been taken seriously enough; its talent for adaptability has been cruelly taken for granted; and now, in an age of supreme graphic frivolity, we pay the price.

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 uo on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

Viviamo in un'epoca di autismo sociale in cui la gente non capisce perchè dovrebbe considerare l'impatto delle proprie azioni sulla collettività.

Once someone has shown you a convincingly different way of looking at the world, it's hard to remember how you saw it before.

So how should you use a colon, to begin with? H. W. Fowler said that the colon delivers the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words, which is not a bad image to start off with.

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.

tutti gli altri hanno cattive maniere; noi abbiamo ogni tanto cattivi momenti. Tutti gli altri sono maleducati; noi talvolta siamo un po' distratti.

The American writer Donald Barthelme wrote that the semicolon is "ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog's belly".

Siamo gente di Teflon, con noi le critiche non attaccano.

I saw a sign for Book's with an apostrophe in it, and something deep inside me snapped; snapped with that melancholy sound you hear in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, like a far-off cable breaking in a mine-shaft.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.