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That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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Roy Blount, Jr.
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: October 4
Musician
Writer
Indianapolis
Indiana
Swamp
Swamps
English
Roots
American
More quotes by 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.
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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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I've never thought it was necessary to make fun of people - you can find fun in people without necessarily mocking them.
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According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.
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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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New York walking isn't exercise: it's a continually showing make-your-own movie.
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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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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?
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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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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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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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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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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.
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Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky.
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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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I am open to the accusation that I see compost as an end it itself. But we do grow some real red damn tomatoes such as you can't get in the stores. And potatoes, beans, lettuce, collards, onions, squash, cauliflower, eggplant, carrots, peppers. Dirt in you own backyard, producing things you eat. Makes you wonder.
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Think about scary movies: There's a fine line between horror and humor.
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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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Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.
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