Top 50 Roy Blount Jr. Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’ve never thought it was necessary to make fun of people – you can find fun in people without necessarily mocking them.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

Featured in: Fun Quotes

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

4. “The local groceries are all out of broccoli, loccoli.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

5. “I prefer my oysters fried; that way I know my oysters died.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

7. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

8. “The North isn’t a place. It’s just a direction out of the South.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

9. “A picture’s worth a thousand words? A library card’s worth millions.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

10. “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?”

— Roy Blount Jr.

11. “I think what’s really hard is making sense and making what you write clear and smooth-flowing.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

13. “I do some eccentric dancing.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

15. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

16. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

17. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

18. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

19. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

20. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

22. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

23. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

24. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

25. “New York walking isn’t exercise: it’s a continually showing make-your-own movie.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

26. “That’s American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

28. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

34. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

35. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

38. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

39. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

40. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

41. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

42. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

43. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

44. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

46. “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.”

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

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

— Roy Blount Jr.

50. “Usage ain’t always a matter of ought.”

— Roy Blount Jr.