Going to Vanderbilt did a lot of things for me, and one of the things it cured me of was the need to follow college football.
Think about scary movies: There’s a fine line between horror and humor.
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.
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.
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.
I prefer my oysters fried; that way I know my oysters died.
Perhaps the truth is that heavy literature blooms in extremes of temperature.
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.
It’s my belief that sanity lies in realizing that reality is not exactly what we had in mind.
When I was a little kid, of course, I was brown all summer. That’s because I was free as a bird- nothing to do but catch bugs all day.
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.
I think what’s really hard is making sense and making what you write clear and smooth-flowing.
I like weeding, but I tend to think of it as a solitary activity.
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?
I do some eccentric dancing.
Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.
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.
Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.
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.
I always wanted to win the Super Bowl so I could take it and hold it and see what lies beyond it. I think it may be the sun.