Larry McMurtry Quotes (42 Quotes)



    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.

    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.


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



    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.

    But, if one cuts more deeply, the lonesome dove is Newt, a lonely teenager who is the unacknowledged son of Captain Call and a kindly whore named Maggie, who is now dead. So the central theme of the novel is not the stocking of Montana but unacknowledged paternity. All of the Hat Creek Outfit, including particularly Augustus McCrae, want Call to accept the boy as his son.


    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.

    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.


    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.


    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

    For most of the hours of the day-and most of the months of the year-the sun had the town trapped deep in dust, far out in the chaparral flats, a heaven for snakes and horned toads, roadrunners and stinging lizards, but a hell for pigs and Tennesseans.


    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.

    He sat where he was, on Mouse, in the grip of terrible indecision. He almost wished something would happen-a sudden attack of Mexicans or something. He might be killed, but at least he wouldn't have to make a choice between disobeying Mr. Gus and disobeying Lorena.



    It doesn't present any kind of agenda, any politics at all, one way or the other at all. It just says life is not for sissies.

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

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

    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.

    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.

    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.

    You need strength love is not easy. It's not easy if you find it, it's not easy if you don't find it. It's not easy if you find it but it doesn't work out. It merely says the strong survive, but not everybody is strong.

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


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

    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.

    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.

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

    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.

    Perhaps the truth really is, Americans dont want cowboys to be gay.

    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.



    More Larry McMurtry Quotations (Based on Topics)


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