Roy Blount, Jr. Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.
-
Lots of people have expressed consternation that I haven't gotten rid of Southern accent, but I just never saw any reason to lose the flavor that I grew up with. I enjoy saying some things with a Southern accent.
-
Ham's substantial, ham is fat. Ham is firm and sound. Ham's what God was getting at When He made pigs so round.
-
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.
-
The local groceries are all out of broccoli, loccoli.
-
The legendary yet factual Curtis Wilkie has been the right man in the right place at an uncanny number of extraordinary times.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Twiddle-twiddle away at my softly clicky keyboard for a while, making twiddly adjustments all along- and then print what I have twiddled. Glare at the printout and snarl and curse and scribble almost illegibly all over it with a ballpoint pen. Go back to the machine and enter the scribbles. Repeat this procedure until I hate the very meaning of every word I know.
-
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.
-
In the beginning, Atlanta was without form, and void; and it still is.
-
Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky.
-
An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again.
-
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.
-
A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party.
-
I've never thought it was necessary to make fun of people - you can find fun in people without necessarily mocking them.
-
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'.