Roy Blount Jr. > Quotes

“If a cat spoke, it would say things like 'Hey, I don’t see the problem here.”
― Roy Blount Jr.

“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., Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South

“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.”
― Roy Blount Jr., Where Books Fall Open: A Reader's Anthology of Wit & Passion

“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.”
― Roy Blount Jr.

“Eaters of Wonder Bread
Must be underbred.
So little to eat.
Where's the wheat?”
― Roy Blount Jr., Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory

“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.”
― Roy Blount Jr.

“Perhaps the truth is that heavy literature blooms in extremes of temperature.”
― Roy Blount Jr., Where Books Fall Open: A Reader's Anthology of Wit & Passion

“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.”
― Roy Blount Jr.

“When mannequins have nipples, it's a cold-hearted world.”
― Roy Blount, Jr.

“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.

“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.”
― Roy Blount Jr., Where Books Fall Open: A Reader's Anthology of Wit & Passion

“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.”
― Roy Blount Jr., Hail, Hail, Euphoria!: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made

“According to that book, only one Marx contributed an unforgotten pun to the Round Tablers’ vaunted word games. It wasn’t Groucho, who must have been furious. Nor was it Harpo, who for all we know sat at the table naked. Nor was it Chico, who had more dangerous games elsewhere. It was Gummo. Evidently Gummo had a seat at that table at least once, and he made it count. Everybody knows that Dorothy Parker, challenged to make a sentence with the word horticulture, quipped as follows: “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.” But who knew that Gummo, taking on euphoria, came up with this: LEFT TO RIGHT: Harpo, Zeppo, Chico, Groucho, and Gummo, 1957. “Go outside and play,” Minnie told the brothers. “Which ones?” they asked. And she said: “Euphoria.”*”
― Roy Blount Jr., Hail, Hail, Euphoria!: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made

“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.”
― Roy Blount Jr.

“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.”
― Roy Blount Jr., What Men Don't Tell Women

“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.

“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.”
― Roy Blount Jr., What Men Don't Tell Women

“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.

“An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again.”
― Roy Blount Jr., What Men Don't Tell Women

“We live in an era in which tomatoes and fudgesicles taste pretty much the same.”
― Roy Blount, Jr.

“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.”
― Roy Blount Jr., About Three Bricks Shy: And The Load Filled Up

“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.”
― Roy Blount Jr., What Men Don't Tell Women

“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.”
― Roy Blount Jr., What Men Don't Tell Women