Happy Birthday, Roy Blount Jr., born 4 October 1941.
Nine Quotes
- 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.
- Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.
- Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party.
- A good heavy book holds you down. It’s an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic. Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky. Put The Idiot in your lap or over your face, and you know where you are going to be for the afternoon.
- The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realise that it has its own cape, sword, and little hat.
- An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again. Say you go in and discover that there are no copies of your book on the shelves. You resent all the other books – I don’t care if they are Great Expectations
, Life on the Mississippi, and the King James Bible that are on the shelves.
- We don’t want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighbourhoods.
- I think a writer is not an ideal husband… . Writers tend to get off into their own heads and not notice the people that they’re living with, or they get irritable with the people that they’re living with when the people insist on being noticed.
- Perhaps the truth is that heavy literature blooms in extremes of temperature.
Roy Blount Jr. is an American writer. He has published 23 books, including Alphabet Juice and Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans
. He is also an ex-president of the Authors Guild, a usage consultant for the American Heritage Dictionary, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, and a member of both the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the band the Rock Bottom Remainders.
Source for Image
Author’s website
http://www.royblountjr.com/resume.htm
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