Roy Blount, Jr. Quotes - 9quotes.com

The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.'
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
I just think lots of words have physicality. How about the word 'wobble?' You think that's arbitrary? When you say the word 'wince,' you wince. How about that?
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
When money gets too far away from actual, physical, real equity and property it gets too abstract and too distantly derived and then suddenly it's not worth anything anymore. And the same is true of language.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
I do some eccentric dancing.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
I heard on public radio recently, there's a thing called Weed Dating. Singles get together in a garden and weed and then they take turns, they keep matching up with other people. Two people will weed down one row and switch over with two other people. It's in Vermont. I don't think I'd be very good at Weed Dating.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
I like weeding, but I tend to think of it as a solitary activity.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
When I weed, I like to get off into my own head. For one thing, my wife plants and I have trouble telling which plants are weeds and which are my favorite plants. So I tend to hop around and grab the weeds that I know are weeds. So I don't weed all that linearly. I tend to weed haphazardly.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
To me, letters have always been a robust medium of sublimation. I don't remember what I was like before I learned my ABC's, but for as long as I can remember I have made them with my fingers and felt them in my bones.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
I have written some of the clumsiest, most clogged-yet-vagrant, hobbledehoyish, hitch-slipping sentences ever conceived by the human mind.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realize that it has its own cape, sword and little hat.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.
Think about scary movies: There's a fine line between horror and humor.
Written by Roy Blount, Jr.

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