(Today is also the birthday of Damon Runyon and Charleton Heston)
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Roy Alton Blount, Jr. (b. October 4, 1941) is an American writer. Best known as a humorist, Blount is also a reporter, speaker and versifier who claims that he can't act but did appear as himself in a cameo in "Treme," and is heartbrokenly unable to make music in any form yet performs in an ill-defined capacity with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band composed entirely of writers. He is also a former president of the Authors Guild. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A dog will make eye contact. A cat will, too, but a cat's eyes don't even look entirely warm-blooded to me, whereas a dog's eyes look human except less guarded.
A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.
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.
Anybody who claims not to feel bad when they're 67 is lying.
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.
Doctors and lawyers must go to school for years and years, often with little sleep and with great sacrifice to their first wives.
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.
Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.
I do hope you realize that every time you use disinterested to mean uninterested, an angel dies.
I have to be firm on this: unique is not to be modified. Adding very or absolutely is like putting a propeller on a rabbit to make him hop better. It won't work, and he won't be a rabbit anymore.
I prefer my oysters fried; that way I know my oysters died.
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.
If a cat spoke, it would say things like, "Hey, I don't see the problem here."
In the beginning, Atlanta was without form, and void; and it still is.
Language seems to me intrinsically comic- noises of the tongue, lips, larynx, and palate rendered in ink on paper with the deepest and airiest thoughts in mind and the harshest and tenderest feelings at heart.
Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky.
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
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.
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.'
The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realize that it has its own cape, sword and little hat.
Usage ain't always a matter of ought.
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.
Categories: Question of the day, Roy Blount, Jr.
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