Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
Lynne TrussRead
All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatemala.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Protect your creative work until it is complete to avoid discouragement.
Lynne Truss emphasizes the importance of keeping your creative endeavors private until they are fully developed. Sharing early ideas can lead to external criticism or doubt, which may undermine your confidence and motivation, potentially derailing your project altogether.
Themes
CreativityWritingProtectionConfidenceDiscouragement
In practice
Example use cases
A writer may use this quote to encourage fellow authors at a workshop.
More from Lynne Truss
All quotes →In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.
Lynne TrussRead
Similar quotes
Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous.... Vulnerability is the birthplace of connection and the path to the feeling of worthiness. If it doesn't feel vulnerable, the sharing is probably not constructive.
Bren BrownRead
It is of no consequence of what parents a man is born, as long as he be a man of merit.
HoraceRead
Do you often feel like parched ground, unable to produce anything worthwhile? I do. When I am in need of refreshment, it isn't easy to think of the needs of others. But I have found that if, instead of praying for my own comfort and satisfaction, I ask the Lord to enable me to give to others, an amazing thing often happens - I find my own needs wonderfully met. Refreshment comes in ways I would never have thought of, both for others, and then, incidentally, for myself.
Elisabeth ElliotRead
Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for perhaps those times when Thomas Jefferson ate alone.
John F. KennedyRead
I am a human being, not a human doing. Don't equate your self-worth with how well you do things in life. You aren't what you do. If you are what you do, then when you don't . . , you aren't.
Wayne DyerRead