Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You don't want to make an enemy of Piers Morgan.
Don't pessimism and caution naturally go hand in hand?
The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.
Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.
After university, I got a job sub-editing and for years I was a literary editor.
The way people behave towards each other is a measure of their value as human beings.
What one discovers in life, I find, is that one's personality defects don't come and go.
Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.
Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person.
Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.
The main advantage of working at home is that you get to find out what cats really do all day.
Old radio comedy makes me laugh, as well as 'I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue' and comedians like Paul Merton.
The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.
My favorite thing in the world is a quiz show, 'University Challenge,' so you can see what kind of sad person I am.
Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas?
Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
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.
To some people, the fact that I am not married, or don't have children, would be the reason I have written a book on punctuation.
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 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.
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.
What I have always liked about Brighton is its impersonality. Since the 18th century, people have come, used the place and gone home again.
Texting is a fundamentally sneaky form of communication, which we should despise, but it is such a boon we don't care. We are all sneaks now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you by nature subscribe to the view that everyone except yourself is a berk or a wanker, it is hard to bond with anybody in any rational common cause.
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.
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.
We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.
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.
Evidently an A level in English is a sacred trust, like something out of "The Lord of the Rings". You must go forth with your A level and protect the English language with your bow of elfin gold.
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?
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.
Brackets come in various shapes, types and names: 1 round brackets (which we call brackets, and the Americans call parentheses) 2 square brackets [which we call square brackets, and the Americans call brackets]
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.
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.
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?
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.
No one else understands us 7th sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes, we are often aggressively instructed to 'get a life' by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.
Sticklers never read a book without a pencil at hand, to correct the typographical errors. In short, we are unattractive know-all obsessives who get things out of proportion and are in continual peril of being disowned by our exasperated families.
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.
You should read Wodehouse when you're well and when you're poorly;when you're travelling, and when you're not;when you're feeling clever, and when you're feeling utterly dim. Wodehouse always lifts your spirits,no matter how high they happen to be already.
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.
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.
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.
The advent of the mobile phone was a disaster. We are forced to listen, open-mouthed, to other people's intimate conversations. Increasingly, we are all in our virtual bubbles when we are out in public, whether we are texting, listening to iPods, reading or just staring dangerously at other people.
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.