Quotes from Roy Blount Jr.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

When it's summer, people sit a lot. Or lie. Lie in the sense of recumbency. A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic. Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky. Put The Idiot in your lap or over your face, and you know where you are going to be for the afternoon.

An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again. Say you go in and discover that there are no copies of your book on the shelves. You resent all the other books - I don't care if they are Great Expectations, Life on the Mississippi and the King James Bible that are on the shelves.

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.

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.' -- Roy Blount Jr.

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

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

So slip on your goggles and your reading trunks, for the sun is high. Let me leave you with one more thought. In what season of the year do we find ourselves - I'm speaking for a moment in terms of the physical world - wading through things? Surf. Kelp. Books. Summer.

Hitler had been in power for six months. Duck Soup, said Harpo, was his most difficult movie, and the only one in which he worried about his performance. Not because of the director or the script. "The trouble was Adolph Hitler." American radio was broadcasting Hitler's speeches, and "twice we suspended shooting to listen to him scream.

Once a visiting carnival boxer was getting the best of the Rooneys' friend Squawker Mullen and Dan reached into the ring and belted the carnie and his friends hollered "Hey Rube!" and in the ensuing melee the tent collapsed and the disturbance raged on lumpily within the great folds of canvas.

I was overstating my case. I wasn't at all sure I had a case and I was overstating it. I have a tendency sometimes to start saying things I don't necessarily actually think, because I don't want people to leap too soon to conclude that I can't possibly think what I think they think I can't possibly think.

What is the difference between an author and a writer? A writer, as we know, writes; an author has written. What does an author do? Auth? Authorize? An author authors. But never in the present tense. No one says, when asked what he or she is doing, "I'm authoring.

But authorship is not to be denied. Not even if you are Thomas Pynchon and stonewall all attempts to establish your actual existence. My own feeling is that Pynchon does not exist, and neither do the last five hundred pages of Gravity's Rainbow, but there is no question whatsoever that Thomas Pynchon is an author.

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

I am often asked: "What are Southern women like?" That is a question that many people feel entitled to an answer to. But I cannot speak with authority — not with authority as it is known in the South — about Southern women. I am acquainted with no more than two-thirds of them, and several of those I haven't seen in some time.

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.

If you were a member of Jesse James's band and people asked you what you were, you wouldn't say, "Well, I'm a desperado." You'd say something like, "I work in banks," or "I've done some railroad work." It took me a long time just to say, "I'm a writer." It's really embarrassing.