One of the great pleasures of reading is to find to find, in the writing of someone you respect, an opinion (or prejudice, to be fair) exactly like your own. That happened to me recently when I came across this passage in Lewis Thomas' The Medusa and the Snail:

"Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasized its banality!"

(In keying the passage in, I had to stop and search my keyboard to find the exclamation point.)