Larry McMurtry Quotes

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

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

Uva uvum vivendo varia fit

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

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

Razzy was insulting me silently somehow.

The older the violin, the sweeter the music.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Nothing good ever comes without a price.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Death and worse happened on the plains.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Texas is rich in unredeemed dreams

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mystery is underrated, and understanding is overrated.

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

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.

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

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.

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.