Roy Blount, Jr. Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

Obama’s the most thoughtful-sounding president I can remember. He seems to be saying what he wants to say, and that is a great relief. He always sounds like he’s thinking about what he’s saying while he’s saying it, and that’s a rare thing in politicians.

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

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

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.

The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realize that it has its own cape, sword and little hat.

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

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

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 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?

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

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

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.

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.

I like weeding, but I tend to think of it as a solitary activity.

I do not Twitter. I don’t want to Twitter, and I don’t see any point in Twittering. The last thing I want to do is tell people what I’m doing at the moment because I’m probably not doing what I’m supposed to be doing.

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

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

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.

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.

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