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

One moment you can say the words ‘I am’. And the next, you have no first person, no present tense, and no entitlement, as a subject, to act on verbs of any kind.

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

The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one’s peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.

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.

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

What one discovers in life, I find, is that one’s personality defects don’t come and go.

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.

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.

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.