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Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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Roy Blount, Jr.
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: October 4
Musician
Writer
Indianapolis
Indiana
Anyone
Words
Around
Better
Like
Undertakes
Grind
Literary
Playing
More quotes 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.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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.
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.
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.
Roy Blount, Jr.
Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky.
Roy Blount, Jr.
I do some eccentric dancing.
Roy Blount, Jr.
The legendary yet factual Curtis Wilkie has been the right man in the right place at an uncanny number of extraordinary times.
Roy Blount, Jr.
Lots of people have expressed consternation that I haven't gotten rid of Southern accent, but I just never saw any reason to lose the flavor that I grew up with. I enjoy saying some things with a Southern accent.
Roy Blount, Jr.
I've never thought it was necessary to make fun of people - you can find fun in people without necessarily mocking them.
Roy Blount, Jr.
A picture's worth a thousand words? A library card's worth millions.
Roy Blount, Jr.
That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.
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.
Roy Blount, Jr.
According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.
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.
Roy Blount, Jr.
If a cat spoke, it would say things like, 'Hey, I don't see the problem here.'
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.
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?
Roy Blount, Jr.
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.
Roy Blount, Jr.
New York walking isn't exercise: it's a continually showing make-your-own movie.
Roy Blount, Jr.
Ham's substantial, ham is fat. Ham is firm and sound. Ham's what God was getting at When He made pigs so round.
Roy Blount, Jr.
