Roy Blount Jr.
In 1941, Roy Alton Blount Jr. was born on October 4th in Indianapolis, beginning a life that would take him from the American South through some of the country's most prominent educational institutions and into a career spanning multiple creative fields.
Blount attended Decatur High School before going on to study at Vanderbilt University. He later continued his education at Harvard University, building an academic foundation that would underpin his work across a range of disciplines. Those years of formal education appear to have prepared him for a professional life that resists easy categorization.
A citizen of the United States, Blount has worked as both a screenwriter and a musician, demonstrating a range across the arts that few writers manage to sustain. The combination of those two pursuits — one tied to narrative and dialogue, the other to sound and performance — points to a creative temperament comfortable moving between different forms of expression. His work as a screenwriter places him within a collaborative medium that demands economy and precision, while his activity as a musician suggests an engagement with performance that extends well beyond the written page.
Blount's name appears in major bibliographic records under the authorized form "Blount, Roy, Jr., 1941-," a designation used by libraries and cataloguers to distinguish his body of work within their collections. That cataloguing presence reflects the breadth and durability of his output as a public figure in American letters and entertainment. His dual identity as both a screenwriter and a musician means his contributions touch audiences through more than one medium, making him a somewhat unusual figure among American writers of his generation.
Quotes by Roy Blount Jr.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.