Think about scary movies: There's a fine line between horror and humor.
— Roy Blount, Jr.
Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party.
Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.
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.
I like weeding, but I tend to think of it as a solitary activity.
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.
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.
A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.
People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.
We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods.
Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.
According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.
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.
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.
Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.
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.'
There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves.
The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realize that it has its own cape, sword and little hat.
I have written some of the clumsiest, most clogged-yet-vagrant, hobbledehoyish, hitch-slipping sentences ever conceived by the human mind.
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.
I do some eccentric dancing.
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?
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.
