Roy Blount Jr. Quotes

A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.

It's my belief that sanity lies in realizing that reality is not exactly what we had in mind.

Mozart combined high formality and playfulness that delights as no other composition in any other medium does.

Cats have intercepted my footsteps at the ankle for so long that my gait, both at home and on tour, has been compared to that of a man wading through low surf.

Ham's substantial, ham is fat. Ham is firm and sound. Ham's what God was getting at When He made pigs so round.

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.

The first time I walked into a library, I got so excited I almost wet my pants.

The legendary yet factual Curtis Wilkie has been the right man in the right place at an uncanny number of extraordinary times.

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'.

I prefer my oysters fried; that way I know my oysters died.

Certainly people have said a lot of deeply unfortunate and stupid things in Southern accents, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the accent itself.

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.

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.

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.

The North isn't a place. It's just a direction out of the South.

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

New York walking isn't exercise: it's a continually showing make-your-own movie.

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?

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.

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.

Vincent van Gogh's mother painted all of his best things. The famous mailed decapitated ear was a figment of the public relations firm engaged by Van Gogh's dealer.

Perhaps the truth is that heavy literature blooms in extremes of temperature.

Think about scary movies: There's a fine line between horror and humor.

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.

Doctors and lawyers must go to school for years and years, often with little sleep and with great sacrifice to their first wives.

I've never thought it was necessary to make fun of people - you can find fun in people without necessarily mocking them.

Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party.

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.

Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky.

A picture's worth a thousand words? A library card's worth millions.

In the beginning, Atlanta was without form, and void; and it still is.

An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again.

Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.

Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.

Twitter. It's not a good sound, is it? If it were worth doing, there would be a better word for it.

That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.

Usage ain't always a matter of ought.

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.

The local groceries are all out of broccoli, loccoli.

If a cat spoke, it would say things like, 'Hey, I don't see the problem here.'

Pete Rose is too rich a character to fit on a bronze plaque. He requires a good, trenchant, poignant (ah, Petey) book, and this is it.

If a cat spoke, it would say things like 'Hey, I don’t see the problem here.