Roy Blount Jr. Quotes

It all depends what you mean by.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

I guess I'm attracted to more archaic words because they can be imbued with more meaning, because their definition is elusive.

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

The way I write, words can means lots of different things.

I'm perplexed, though, by your application of the term 'negative' to my figural imagery.

It depends on what the meaning of “is” is.

It is important that we realize that words have meanings far beyond the dictionary definition.

Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

It's not easy to define poetry.

Metaphors, similes, puns - all manner of metonymy - I'm interested in language that cannot be parsed by a machine - language that can only be understood through acculturation.

I looked up 'standard' in the dictionary. There are eleven different definitions.

Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough.

I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.

Who knew three dots could make such a difference? Like everything else, a love or a wish or whatever, it was all in the way you read it.

Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.

In many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on.

Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

Words take on many different meanings.

The secret of it is to read what you've got in front of you. Don't, if you suspect that something has a double meaning, don't pause. Don't put on a leery vocal expression if you know what I mean on radio. Don't sort of do anything other than read it.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.