Quote

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

Lynne Truss

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lynne Truss
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: May 31
Author
Journalist
Writer
Kingston
Literary
University
Jobs
Years
Editor
Editing
Editors

More quotes by Lynne Truss

Image
The way people behave towards each other is a measure of their value as human beings.
Lynne Truss
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
I used to help my dad with a stall selling eggs when I was about 12. People were so hard up they would ask for one egg. But mostly no one came by at all. It was very demoralising.
Lynne Truss
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
What one discovers in life, I find, is that one's personality defects don't come and go.
Lynne Truss
Image
Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word punctilious (attentive to formality or etiquette) comes from the same original root as punctuation.
Lynne Truss
Image
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
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
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
Image
The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.
Lynne Truss
Image
Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.
Lynne Truss
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
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.
Lynne Truss
Image
The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.
Lynne Truss
Image
The main advantage of working at home is that you get to find out what cats really do all day.
Lynne Truss
Image
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