Larry McMurtry Quotations

True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends' boyfriend - and he accepts it

No illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind, such as cars that won't start.

If we know anything about man, it's that he's not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

A man that ain't willin' to cheat for a poke don't want it bad enough.

Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.

One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider's outsider.

Members of the Academy are mostly urban people. We are an urban nation. We are not a rural nation. It's not easy even to get a rural story made.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.

If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.

She trusted us more than she should have. She trusted us not to make the story unless we could make it right.

Perhaps the truth really is, Americans don?t want cowboys to be gay.

Bunk! Pure bunk! For all I know Yellow Hand died of old age.

It allows him to connect with, to find his way to, other exiles and outsiders.

I think it will be able to stay solvent and stay open, ... I didn't want to close it.

Most heartfelt, I thank my typewriter. My typewriter is a Hermes 3000, surely one of the noblest instruments of European genius.

When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake-not a very big one.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look -- historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

It's not going to threaten anybody's manhood going to see a movie in which there is gay sex.

But yesterday's gone, we can't get it back.

The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings - crowded, active, thick. But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow's horizons are vague and its demands are few.

The only bookstore I had was the paperback rack at the drugstore.

I don't do well with changes in my routine. I read at least three newspapers a day, for example. I'm frustrated if for some reason I can't get ahold of all three.

The Western notion of masculinity goes back a long way. It doesn't allow for women, and it's also racist - it doesn't allow for other cultures.

WHEN AUGUSTUS CAME OUT on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over.

He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.

Mystery is underrated, and understanding is overrated.

Occasionally the very youngness of the young moved him to charity--they had no sense of the swiftness of life, nor of its limits. The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour.

Most young dealers of the Silicon Chip Era regard a reference library as merely a waste of space. Old Timers on the West Coast seem to retain a fondness for reference books that goes beyond the practical. Everything there is to know about a given volume may be only a click away, but there are still a few of us who'd rather have the book than the click. A bookman's love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.

Certainly on the vast windy plain, there was plenty of nothing to be looked at.

I suppose you set up reading the Good Book all night-spoken by Woodrow Call

It's really quite simple. Mr. Isinglass robbed my father, destroyed my mother, exiled my brothers, and ruined me. If I catch him asleep I'll kill him. I do hope you like this pudding. I had to ride quite a way to find the plums.

A man who wouldn't cheat for a poke don't want one bad enough. --Augustus "Gus" McCrae

I never met a soul in this world as normal as me.

From him to the stars, in all directions, there was only silence and emptiness.

I'm glad I've been wrong enough to keep in practice. . . You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it. If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it's bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day--that way they ain't usually much worse than a dry shave.

I don't see how being married could be any worse than listening to you talk for twenty years, but that still ain't much of a recommendation for it.

The reason men are so awful is because some woman has spoiled them.

I think its a sickness to grieve too much for those who never cared a fig for you.

-she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn't last long, once they became men.

Part of the trick of being happy is a refusal to allow oneself to become too nostalgic for the heady triumphs of one's youth.

You know Deets is like me - he's not one to quit on a garment just because it's got a little age - spoken by Augustus McCrae

The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.

... people are always turning out to be tougher than I think they are.

The older the violin, the sweeter the music.

If I had a mind to rent pigs, I'd be mighty upset. A man that likes to rent pigs won't be stopped.

Live through it," Call said. "That's all we can do.

You can scare off a lot of cowboys just by looking mean, I guess.

If a warrior lacked wisdom, courage alone would not keep him alive for long.

Razzy was insulting me silently somehow.

They say money kinda melts when you take it across a border.

I'm sure partial to the evening,' Augustus said. 'The evening and the morning. If we just didn't have to have the rest of the dern day I'd be a lot happier.

Though loyal and able and brave, Pea had never displayed the slightest ability to learn from his experience, though his experience was considerable. Time and again he would walk up on the wrong side of a horse that was known to kick, and then look surprised when he got kicked.

It's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.

I hate rude behavior in a man,' he explained in his quiet, unassuming drawl. 'I won't tolerate it.' He politely tipped his hat, and rode away.

In times of crisis human beings don't have it in them to be rational.

Americans' lack of passion for history is well known. History may not quite be bunk, as Henry Ford suggested, but there's no denying that, as a people, we sustain a passionate concentration on the present and the future.

Working- and Middle-class families sat down at the dinner table every night - the shared meal was the touchstone of good manners. Indeed, that dinner table was the one time when we were all together, every day: parents, grandparents, children, siblings. Rudeness between siblings, or a failure to observe the etiquette of passing dishes to one another, accompanied by "please" and "thank you," was the training ground of behavior, the place where manners began.

I remember that the single most vicious letter I ever read was the letter Hemingway wrote Scribners when they asked him to give a blurb for From Here to Eternity. It's there, in the Selected Letters for all to read, an example of a once great writer at his very worst. I doubt that he ever forgave Scribners for publishing James Jones in the first place. War, as Hemingway saw it, belonged to him.

Books can accommodate the proximity of computers but it doesn't seem to work the other way around. Computers now literally drive out books from the place that should, by definition, be books' own home: the library.

Through my college years, topping that ridge had always given me a great sense of being home, but time had diminished the emotion and I had begun to suspect that home was less a place than an empty page.

Death and worse happened on the plains.

A man that will go along with six killings is making his escape a little slow.

I make my share of mistakes, but one I never make is to underestimate the power of things. People imbued from childhood with the myth of the primacy of feeling seldom like to admit they really want things as much as they might want love, but my career has convinced me that plenty of them do. And some want things a lot worse than they want love.

I once owned a collection of 77 novels that won the Pulitzer. The only good novel of the bunch was The Grapes of Wrath.

Nothing good ever comes without a price.

Americans don't want cowboys to be gay.

But the English are different, and they don't know how to be other than different.

Nobody run off with her,” Roscoe said. "She just run off with herself, I guess.

Call saw that everyone was looking at him, the hands and cowboys and townspeople alike. The anger had drained out of him, leaving him feeling tired. He didn't remember the fight, particularly, but people were looking at him as if they were stunned. He felt he should make some explanation, though it seemed to him a simple situation. "I hate a man that talks rude," he said. "I won't tolerate it.

It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.” ~spoken by Augustus McCrae

Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.

A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.

Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain't much of a crime.

Listening to women ain't the fashion in this part of the country.

Texas is rich in unredeemed dreams

The tradition I was born into was essentially nomadic, a herdsmen tradition, following animals across the earth. The bookshops are a form of ranching; instead of herding cattle, I herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.

Self-parody is the first portent of age.

There isn't a thought in my head I care to be alone with for more than five minutes.

Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.

Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.

The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings -- crowded, active, thick. But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow's horizons are vague and its demands are few.

If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analagous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

For the past several centuries the bonding power of the family dinner table has been one of the few constants, and now it's binding no more. The potency of the media is now stronger than that of the family. The wonder is that families still exist at all, since the forces of modern life mainly all pull people away from a family centered way of life.

A woman's love is like the morning dew. It's just as likely to settle on a horse turd as a rose.

Obviously, where art has it over life is in the matter of editing. Life can be seen to suffer from a drastic lack of editing. It stops too quick, or else it goes on too long. Worse, its pacing is erratic. Some chapters are little more than a few sentences in length, while others stretch into volumes. Life, for all its raw talent, has little sense of structure. It creates amazing textures, but it can't be counted on for snappy beginnings or good endings either. Indeed, in many cases no ending is provided at all.

People would be bored shitless if they had to love only the good in someone they care about.

Uva uvum vivendo varia fit

Call listened with amusement--not that the incident hadn't been terrible. Being decapitated was a grisly fate, whether you were a Yankee or not. But then, amusing things happened in battle, as they did in the rest of life. Some of the funniest things he had ever witnessed had occurred during battles. He had always found it more satisfying to laugh on a battlefield than anywhere else, for if you lived to laugh on a battlefield, you could feel you had earned the laugh. But if you just laughed in a saloon, or at a social, the laugh didn't reach deep.

Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.