Punctuation Quotes

It may be tripe, but it’s my tripe – and I do urge other authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act.

Albums are just a punctuation of music. I don’t usually start out with a manifesto. Your tastes change with the process of the album. I just make music and put it out when there’s enough to call it an album.

I’m tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.

I still put punctuation in my texts. If it’s an ‘I’, I make sure it’s a capital.

Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?

We are at a punctuation point in human history where the Industrial Age and institutions have finally come to their logical conclusion. They have essentially run out of gas.

Celebrity is absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it’s all punctuation.

Ladies, if you want to know the way to my heart… good spelling and good grammar, good punctuation, capitalize only where you are supposed to capitalize, it’s done.

I am very aware that playwrights, particularly good ones, have a intention for everything they write. Language and punctuation is used specifically, and most of the time actors can find wonderful clues about character in the rhythm and cadence of the language used.

Phrasing is the idea of finding sentences and using punctuation in speech. I often look at the score to see what’s written in by the composer to see if I can find clues to those directions, like what direction did the composer have in mind, and I try to incorporate those things as much as possible.

I like all things grammatical, and I had already written several books about parts of speech, and even the alphabet, so everything that makes up a sentence and even a word was covered except for punctuation.

There’s a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want.

We never let go. Ever. Even with punctuation. It’s frightening. I can’t see anyone from any record company ever writing an email to Neil and not getting it back, with corrections.

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.

The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web, and they know their HTML and stuff. It’s pretty shocking to me.

Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.

Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death’s perfect punctuation mark is a smile.

Cinema seats make people lazy. They expect to be given all the information. But for me, question marks are the punctuation of life.

And if you want to know why great editors scare the pants off of writers everywhere, read ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ by Lynne Truss. The punctuation police are everywhere!

I write in the most distressingly slow way in terms of punctuation and grammar.

True net-heads sometimes resort to punctuation cartoons to get around the absence of inflection.

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

I don’t think music affects what words I choose to type in what order, within what punctuation, at this point, because I’m rereading and editing each sentence, at this point, in my published books, probably 100-150 times each, on average, and listening to probably 20-60 different songs in that time.

When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed – from song lyric to tragic speech – must make its point, as it were, without reference back.

Bin Laden’s death is just a punctuation point on a set of problems they’ve had for a long time. I think the prognosis for al-Qaida and groups like it is really bad, and that’s a good thing.

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along – and I must say I had a good time using them.

I’ve always had a problem with conventional punctuation of dialogue because it does seem to me to set it off too much from the narrative. I mean, in life, things don’t stop while somebody says something, and then stuff starts up again; it’s all happening at once.

Yeah, well, the F-bomb – it’s become as ubiquitous as the word ‘like.’ People just throw the word ‘like’ around as punctuation. And I think in a lot of everyday speech, the F-bomb has become a kind of dash or a comma.

I find getting the first draft down to be the biggest challenge. Every word, every punctuation mark, every plot point is a decision. It’s much more fun to play with something that already exists.

It is really important that focusing on things such as spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting doesn’t inhibit the creative flow. When I was at school there was a huge focus on copying and testing and it put me off words and stories for years.