Lynne Truss
Lynne Truss was born on 31 May 1955 in Kingston upon Thames, and grew up in the United Kingdom as an English author. Her early education took place at The Tiffin Girls' School, after which she went on to study at University College London, where she completed her undergraduate education.
From those academic foundations, Truss built a career as both a writer and a journalist, working in English across a range of formats. Over the course of her career she has produced work in both capacities, contributing to British writing and journalism as a citizen of the United Kingdom. Her output has kept her active across different areas of English-language writing throughout her professional life.
Her work as a writer and journalist has been recognised through formal honours. She holds an honorary doctorate, and she has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. These two distinctions mark the recognition her career has received from academic and literary institutions in the United Kingdom.
Truss remains a living figure in British writing and journalism, continuing her career as an English author. Her fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature stands as a concrete marker of the regard in which her work has been held.
Quotes by Lynne Truss
Lynne Truss's insights on:
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.