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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.