Larry McMurtry Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Larry McMurtry
True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends' boyfriends – and he accepts it.

Larry McMurtry
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.

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

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. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb, and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

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

Larry McMurtry
It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.

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

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

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

Larry McMurtry
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.

Larry McMurtry
By the time the shade had reached the river, Augustus would have mellowed with the evening and be ready for some intelligent conversation, which usually involved talking to himself.

Larry McMurtry
It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author's affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much energy as one pushes them through their lives.

Larry McMurtry
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.

Larry McMurtry
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.

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

Larry McMurtry
People are always turning out to be tougher than I think they are.

Larry McMurtry
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.

Larry McMurtry
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.

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

Larry McMurtry
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

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

Larry McMurtry
It's like I told you last night son. The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.

Larry McMurtry
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.

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

Larry McMurtry
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.

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

Larry McMurtry
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.

Larry McMurtry
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.

Larry McMurtry