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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

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Lynne Truss
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: May 31
Author
Journalist
Writer
Kingston
People
Rounds
Consequently
Ears
Expressions
Expression
Regarded
Pieces
Irrelevant
Understandably
Everybody
Walked
Faraway
Used
Agents
Preoccupied
Littles
Nearly
Scum
Little
Round
Cia

More quotes by Lynne Truss

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The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas?
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After university, I got a job sub-editing and for years I was a literary editor.
Lynne Truss
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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.
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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.
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The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.
Lynne Truss
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The way people behave towards each other is a measure of their value as human beings.
Lynne Truss
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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
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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
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What one discovers in life, I find, is that one's personality defects don't come and go.
Lynne Truss
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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
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Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
Lynne Truss
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Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.
Lynne Truss
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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
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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