Top 80 Quotes & Sayings by Larry McMurtry

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.

Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.

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

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.

Self-parody is the first portent of age.

Americans don't want cowboys to be gay.

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

True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends' boyfriends - 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Nothing good ever comes without a price.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Mystery is underrated, and understanding is overrated.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Texas is rich in unredeemed dreams

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

Uva uvum vivendo varia fit

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

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

Death and worse happened on the plains.