Quotes & Sayings About Semicolons

Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum:one No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly. Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it. — Richard Hugo

It should come as no surprise that writers take an interest in punctuation. I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, "I should have used fewer semicolons" - and although I have spent months fruitlessly trying to track down the chap responsible, I believe it none the less. If it turns out that no one actually did say this on their deathbed, I shall certainly save it up for my own. — Lynne Truss

I remember the rule for semicolons; the sentences on both sides have to be full ones. — Hugh Howey

Writing is new, relatively speaking. Story telling is ancient. Tell your story first putting aside all other worries. Leave fretting over homonyms, semicolons, and Oxford commas to editors and friends you can be bribe with baking. — Ada Maria Soto

Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after "semicolons," and another one after "now." And — Ursula K. Le Guin

Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don't do anything, don't suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites. — Kurt Vonnegut

The dash helps to indicate that the two thoughts are intimately related, and it's less stodgy than a semicolon, which would have performed the same function (and who talks in semicolons?). — Bill Walsh

To one who has enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any hour, what thoughts can be recorded about it seem like the commas and semicolons in the paragraph-mere stops. — Margaret Fuller

How come you never use semicolons?" she'll say. Or: "How come you chop it all up into little sections instead of letting it flow and flow?" That sort of thing. — Kurt Vonnegut

I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how to
become a professional writer. I say to you, If you really want to hurt your
parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can
do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite
hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've
been to college. — Kurt Vonnegut

Pretentious and over-active semicolons have reached epidemic proportions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought. — Lynne Truss

Lust fades after climax, love lasts until breakfast! — Tom Conrad

When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of the curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him he heard less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not. — Nicole Krauss

Semicolons ... signal, rather than shout, a relationship ... A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don't have to draw you a picture; a hint will do." — George Will

You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life. — George Bernard Shaw

The one critisism the author of Slaugherhouse-Five would make of the young writer was what he called a punctuation problem. Mr. Vonnegut didn't like all the semicolons. 'People will probably figure out that you went to college
you don't have to try to prove it to them,' he told Danny. — John Irving

I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc. — John Clare

Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, UP like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots ... you stop. But the thermals that benignly waft our sentences to new altitudes - that allow us to coast on air, and loop-the-loop, suspending the laws of gravity - well, they are the colons and semicolons. — Lynne Truss

If colons and semicolons give themselves airs and graces, at least they also confer airs and graces that the language would be lost without. — Lynne Truss

No one knows what they are anymore," he says. "If you're not in the habit of reading nineteenth-century novels, you think that the author has killed a fruit fly directly above a comma - semicolons have become nothing but a distraction. — John Irving

Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses. — George Eliot

I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, I should have used fewer semicolons — Lynne Truss

Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty points off the TomJones Index. — Jasper Fforde

In her autobiographical Giving Up the Ghost (2003), Hilary Mantel reveals: I have always been addicted to something or other, usually something there's no support group for. Semicolons, for instance, I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time. — Lynne Truss

In the long sentences of the president's message, semicolons followed by "yet" or "but" separated clauses that balanced each side of an issue, reflecting Roosevelt's characteristic "on the one hand, on the other" style of crediting antagonistic views. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Great. They fucked with my punctuation?" "Pam says you're overly fond of semicolons. — M. Pierce

He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James.
"No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader. — George Eliot

I hope that my ideas attract a lively dialogue, even if my sentences are simple. Simple sentences have always served me well. And I don't use semicolons. It's hard to read anyway, especially for high school kids. Also, I avoid irony, too. I don't like people saying one thing and meaning the other. — Kurt Vonnegut