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.

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

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

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

In my worst moments, I think the biggest effect of 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' was to kill the happiness of people who had previously skipped through life, unaware of all the atrocities lurking in the world around them.

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.

We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.