Quotes from Roy Blount, Jr.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I do some eccentric dancing.

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.

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.'

When mannequins have nipples, it's a cold-hearted world.

We live in an era in which tomatoes and fudgesicles taste pretty much the same.

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

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

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

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'.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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