123 Quotes by Lynne Truss

"The rule is: the word 'it's' (with apostrophe) stands for 'it is' or 'it has'. If the word does not stand for 'it is' or 'it has' then what you require is 'its'. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. 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 up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave."

"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."

"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."

"A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. "Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife annual and tosses it over his shoulder. "I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up." The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

"The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning."

"Don’t pessimism and caution naturally go hand in hand?"

"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."

"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."

"In fact, it seemed to me that every single item on the news – concerning economic doom and political hypocrisy and social breakdown – was not “news” at all. What I could hear was just a series of utterly transparent ploys to frighten and alarm the listeners – and frighten them, moreover, about the wrong things. The."

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