Top 60 Lynne Truss Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.”

— Lynne Truss

2. “The main advantage of working at home is that you get to find out what cats really do all day.”

— Lynne Truss

3. “Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.”

— Lynne Truss

4. “The way people behave towards each other is a measure of their value as human beings.”

— Lynne Truss

5. “Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.”

— Lynne Truss

6. “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

— Lynne Truss

7. “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?”

— Lynne Truss

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

— Lynne Truss

9. “The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.”

— Lynne Truss

10. “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

11. “Remember that thing Truman Capote said years ago about Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing, it’s typing”? I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn’t writing, and doesn’t even qualify as typing either: it’s just sending.”

— Lynne Truss

12. “In Beachcomber’s hilarious columns about the Apostropher Royal in The Express, a certain perversely comforting law is often reiterated: the Law of Conservation of Apostrophes. A heresy since the 13th century, this law states that a balance exists in nature: “For every apostrophe omitted from an it’s, there is an extra one put into an its.” Thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant, even if this means we have double the reason to go and bang our heads against a wall.”

— Lynne Truss

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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.”

— Lynne Truss

16. “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.”

— Lynne Truss

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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.”

— Lynne Truss

20. “Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas?”

— Lynne Truss

21. “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.”

— Lynne Truss

22. “My favorite thing in the world is a quiz show, ‘University Challenge,’ so you can see what kind of sad person I am.”

— Lynne Truss

23. “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.”

— Lynne Truss

24. “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

25. “Old radio comedy makes me laugh, as well as ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’ and comedians like Paul Merton.”

— Lynne Truss

26. “Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person.”

— Lynne Truss

27. “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.”

— Lynne Truss

28. “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

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

— Lynne Truss

30. “Siamo gente di Teflon, con noi le critiche non attaccano.”

— Lynne Truss

31. “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.”

— Lynne Truss

32. “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.”

— Lynne Truss

33. “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

34. “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.”

— Lynne Truss

35. “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.”

— Lynne Truss

36. “I’m sure people did question whether Italian printers were quite the right people to legislate on the meaning of everything; but on the other hand, resistance was obviously useless against a family that could invent italics.”

— Lynne Truss

37. “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.”

— Lynne Truss

38. “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

39. “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.”

— Lynne Truss

40. “All the important roles shortly boiled down to one: remember your with other people; show some consideration.”

— Lynne Truss

41. “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

42. “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.”

— Lynne Truss

43. “So how should you use a colon, to begin with? H. W. Fowler said that the colon “delivers the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words”, which is not a bad image to start off with.”

— Lynne Truss

44. “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.”

— Lynne Truss

45. “If there is one lesson to be learned from this book, it is that there is never a dull moment in the world of punctuation.”

— Lynne Truss

46. “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.”

— Lynne Truss

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

— Lynne Truss

48. “I hear there are now Knightsbridge clinics offering semicolonic irrigation – but for many it may be too late.”

— Lynne Truss

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

— Lynne Truss

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

— Lynne Truss