Roy Blount, Jr. Quotes
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A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.
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Obama's got a great sense of humor, but mainly he has a great thinking presence, which is uncommon. It's hard to imagine being able to do, think over answers and deliver them on television. If I were president I would constantly be spluttering.
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According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.
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Pete Rose is too rich a character to fit on a bronze plaque. He requires a good, trenchant, poignant (ah, Petey) book, and this is it.
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The North isn't a place. It's just a direction out of the South.
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That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.
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Usage ain't always a matter of ought.
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Doctors and lawyers must go to school for years and years, often with little sleep and with great sacrifice to their first wives.
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Obama's the most thoughtful-sounding president I can remember. He seems to be saying what he wants to say, and that is a great relief. He always sounds like he's thinking about what he's saying while he's saying it, and that's a rare thing in politicians.
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Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.
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Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.
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Twitter. It's not a good sound, is it? If it were worth doing, there would be a better word for it.
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I think writer's block is simply the dread that you are going to write something horrible. But as a writer, I believe that if you sit down at the keys long enough, sooner or later something will come out.
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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.
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Contemporary American children, if they are old enough to grasp the concept of Santa Claus by Thanksgiving, are able to see through it by December 15th.
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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.
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Any given generation gives the next generation advice that the given generation should have been given by the previous generation but now it's too late.
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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.
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It's my belief that sanity lies in realizing that reality is not exactly what we had in mind.
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Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.
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I think what's really hard is making sense and making what you write clear and smooth-flowing.
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If a cat spoke, it would say things like, 'Hey, I don't see the problem here.'
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People don't necessarily want or need to be done unto as you would have them do unto you. They want to be done unto as they want to be done unto.
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New York walking isn't exercise: it's a continually showing make-your-own movie.