A Quote by James Scott Bell

The semi-colon is a burp, a hiccup. It's a drunk staggering out of the saloon at 2 a.m., grabbing your lapels on the way and asking you to listen to one more story. — © James Scott Bell
The semi-colon is a burp, a hiccup. It's a drunk staggering out of the saloon at 2 a.m., grabbing your lapels on the way and asking you to listen to one more story.
My karma's the comma that puts you inside of a coma, Hyphen, dot, dot, semi-colon, leave you semi-swollen. Question mark, you pregnant? Oh you're not? I love you, period.
Be able to hiccup silently, or at least without alerting neighbors to your situation. The first hiccup is an exception.
There must be something wrong with those people who think Audrey Hepburn doesn’t perspire, hiccup or sneeze, because they know that’s not true. I n fact, I hiccup more than most.
You don't know what a semi-colon does... sort of like my act.
I would die at the stake rather than change a semi-colon!
Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
A lot of people think that since I'm drunk in my stories, I must be drunk 24 hours a day. What kind of stupid logic is that? It'd be like if you saw Michael Jordan at a restaurant and were like, "Why aren't you in your basketball uniform?" I leave out way more than I put in.
I want them to listen to me for what I am saying. And I think the best way to do that is to sniff my armpits, and like, sit and burp every now and then.
You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it-it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
Although the only way that I'm well known at Illinois State is that I am the "grammar Nazi." And so any student whose deployment of a semi-colon is not absolutely Mozart-esque knows that they're going to get a C in my class, and so my classes tend to have like four students in them. It's really a lot of fun.
If you are a cabaret artist and you are mostly singing other people's songs, you're asking them to rethink a song, listen to it in a different way. The most impact you can have while asking them to re-listen to a song is if it's a song they know very well.
If I had to choose between putting a saloon or a liberal church on a corner, I'd choose the saloon every time. People who drink up the pay check in the saloon are less likely to become Pharisees, thinking that they don't need the Great Physician, than those who weekly swill the soporific doctrine of man's goodness.
I mean, in my - and I'm not trying to do spilled milk, but in those days it was a little - I think it was much tougher, because you got an image, and you were in a saloon. And it was tough to come out of a saloon and to get in films, and to maintain an image, you know.
On a more technical level, a story takes a lot of words. And to generate words and phrases and images and so on, that will compel the reader to continue reading - that stand a chance of really grabbing a reader - the writer has to work out of a place of, let's say, familiarity and affection. The matrix of the story has to be made out of stuff the writer really knows about and likes. The writer can't be stretching and (purely) inventing all the time. Well, I can't, anyway.
Well, listen, you know, the Czech saying is, you know, when you are drowning you are grabbing even a little twig. That's what all Czechs were doing, grabbing for... with the hope for this little twig.
I will use a form of punctuation of my own, which will be something like this - when one is beginning he takes a long breath, for this use a capital. When he stops for breath, a comma, and when it is all gone, a period. Don't know the use of a semi-colon, but expect it is when one thinks he is out of breath and isn't.
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