JrRoy Blount 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. – Roy Blount, Jr
JrRoy Blount Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. – Roy Blount, Jr
JrRoy Blount We don’t want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods. – Roy Blount, Jr
JrRoy Blount Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words. – Roy Blount, Jr
JrRoy Blount I have written some of the clumsiest, most clogged-yet-vagrant, hobbledehoyish, hitch-slipping sentences ever conceived by the human mind. – Roy Blount, Jr
JrRoy Blount 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
JrRoy Blount 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
JrRoy Blount 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
JrRoy Blount 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
JrRoy Blount 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
