Literature
"Just as there are writers who worship the semicolon, there are other high stylists who dismiss it – who label it, if you please, middle-class."
Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.Some authors have spurned the semicolon throughout their works. Lynne Truss stated that "Samuel Beckett spliced his way merrily through such novels as Molloy and Malone Dies, thumbing his nose at the semicolon all the way," "James Joyce preferred the colon, as more authentically classical; P. G. Wodehouse did an effortlessly marvellous job without it; George Orwell tried to avoid the semicolon completely in Coming up for Air, (1939)," "Martin Amis included just one semicolon in Money (1984)," and "Umberto Eco was congratulated by an academic reader for using no semicolons in The Name of the Rose (1983)."
Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without a Country (2005) stated: "Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college." In response to Vonnegut and Truss, Ben MacIntyre, columnist in The Times (London), wrote: "Americans have long regarded the semi-colon with suspicion, as a genteel, self-conscious, neither-one-thing-nor-the other sort of punctuation mark, with neither the butchness of a full colon nor the flighty promiscuity of the comma. Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons."
Read more about this topic: Semicolon
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“The Irishman in English literature may be said to have been born with an apology in his mouth.”
—James Connolly (1870–1916)
“Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
“Views of women, on one side, as inwardly directed toward home and family and notions of men, on the other, as outwardly striving toward fame and fortune have resounded throughout literature and in the texts of history, biology, and psychology until they seem uncontestable. Such dichotomous views defy the complexities of individuals and stifle the potential for people to reveal different dimensions of themselves in various settings.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)