Top 67 Quotes & Sayings by Roy Blount, Jr.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I have written some of the clumsiest, most clogged-yet-vagrant, hobbledehoyish, hitch-slipping sentences ever conceived by the human mind.

We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

A dog will make eye contact. A cat will, too, but a cat's eyes don't even look entirely warm-blooded to me, whereas a dog's eyes look human except less guarded. A dog will look at you as if to say, "What do you want me to do for you? I'll do anything for you." Whether a dog can in fact, do anything for you if you don't have sheep (I never have) is another matter. The dog is willing.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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'.

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

Usage ain't always a matter of ought.

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

The local groceries are all out of broccoli, loccoli.

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

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.

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

I do not know what the cat can have eaten. Usually I know exactly what the cat has eaten. Not only have I fed it to the cat, at the cat's insistence, but the cat has thrown it up on the rug, and someone has tracked it all over onto the other rug. I do not know why cats are such habitual vomiters. They do not seem to enjoy it, judging by the sounds they make while they are doing it. It's their nature. A dog is going to bark. A cat is going to vomit.

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.

Obama's got a great sense of humor, but mainly he has a great thinking presence, which is uncommon. It's hard to imagine being able to do, think over answers and deliver them on television. If I were president I would constantly be spluttering.

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.

I am open to the accusation that I see compost as an end it itself. But we do grow some real red damn tomatoes such as you can't get in the stores. And potatoes, beans, lettuce, collards, onions, squash, cauliflower, eggplant, carrots, peppers. Dirt in you own backyard, producing things you eat. Makes you wonder.

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

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.

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.

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