Roy Blount, Jr. Quotes
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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.
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I do not know what the cat can have eaten. Usually I know exactly what the cat has eaten. Not only have I fed it to the cat, at the cat's insistence, but the cat has thrown it up on the rug, and someone has tracked it all over onto the other rug. I do not know why cats are such habitual vomiters. They do not seem to enjoy it, judging by the sounds they make while they are doing it. It's their nature. A dog is going to bark. A cat is going to vomit.
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In the beginning, Atlanta was without form, and void; and it still is.
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According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.
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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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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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Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.
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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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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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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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When I was a little kid, of course, I was brown all summer. That's because I was free as a bird- nothing to do but catch bugs all day.
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I think a writer is not an ideal husband... Writers tend to get off into their own heads and not notice the people that they're living with, or they get irritable with the people that they're living with when the people insist on being noticed.
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I do some eccentric dancing.
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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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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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New York walking isn't exercise: it's a continually showing make-your-own movie.
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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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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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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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Certainly people have said a lot of deeply unfortunate and stupid things in Southern accents, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the accent itself.
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It was easy to make fun of Bush, but it was sort of like shooting fish in a barrel and it didn't really feel all that good because it was so easy to do. I would much rather live under a thoughtful president. Even if it makes it harder to be funny about politics, it makes it more interesting to be funny about politics.
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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.