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.Collection: Car
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.Collection: Imagination
Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.
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.
Self-parody is the first portent of age.
Americans don't want cowboys to be gay.
Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.
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.
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.
Uva uvum vivendo varia fitCollection: Fit
A woman's love is like the morning dew. It's just as likely to settle on a horse turd as a rose.Collection: Morning
Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.Collection: Texas
Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.Collection: Writing
It's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.Collection: Hardship
People would be bored shitless if they had to love only the good in someone they care about.Collection: People
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.Collection: Country
Mystery is underrated, and understanding is overrated.Collection: Understanding
Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.Collection: Rivers
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.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Mistake
A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Disappointment
The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.Collection: Earth
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.Collection: Contentment
If a warrior lacked wisdom, courage alone would not keep him alive for long.Collection: Warrior
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.Collection: Book
In times of crisis human beings don't have it in them to be rational.Collection: Times Of Crisis
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Frustrated
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.Collection: Children
Death and worse happened on the plains.Collection: Happened
I think its a sickness to grieve too much for those who never cared a fig for you.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Other Cultures
Live through it," Call said. "That's all we can do.Collection: Said
The older the violin, the sweeter the music.Collection: Violin
If I had a mind to rent pigs, I'd be mighty upset. A man that likes to rent pigs won't be stopped.Collection: Men
... people are always turning out to be tougher than I think they are.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Years
-she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn't last long, once they became men.Collection: Boys
I never met a soul in this world as normal as me.Collection: Soul
Certainly on the vast windy plain, there was plenty of nothing to be looked at.Collection: Windy
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.Collection: Moon
Nobody run off with her,” Roscoe said. "She just run off with herself, I guess.Collection: Running
They say money kinda melts when you take it across a border.Collection: Travel