American - Writer | October 4, 1941 -
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.
WifePlantsTroubleKnowMy OwnOwn
Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.
ArtCreativityGardeningMeWriting
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.
BlueAncestorsEnemiesUpEnglish
According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.
MeaningBetweenScholarsWord
The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.'
TimeBetterFindI CanSaidSay
A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.
GoodBookYouDownAnchorHeavy
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.
LearningWomenLiteratureStudying
Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.
FatherMeLessonEarlyLostBeing
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?
WordsThinkYouSayJustWord
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.
MoneyWordsSchoolCollegeLanguage
When money gets too far away from actual, physical, real equity and property it gets too abstract and too distantly derived and then suddenly it's not worth anything anymore. And the same is true of language.
MoneyLanguageWorthFar AwayTrue
I do some eccentric dancing.
DancingEccentricSome
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