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If a cat spoke, it would say things like, 'Hey, I don't see the problem here.'

Roy Blount, Jr.

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Roy Blount, Jr.
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: October 4
Musician
Writer
Indianapolis
Indiana
Things
Would
Like
Spokes
Spoke
Hey
Cat
Problem

More quotes by Roy Blount, Jr.

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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.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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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.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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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.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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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.
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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.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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Vincent van Gogh's mother painted all of his best things. The famous mailed decapitated ear was a figment of the public relations firm engaged by Van Gogh's dealer.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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A picture's worth a thousand words? A library card's worth millions.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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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.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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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?
Roy Blount, Jr.
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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.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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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.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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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.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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The North isn't a place. It's just a direction out of the South.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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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.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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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.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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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.