Best 115 quotes of Larry Mcmurtry on MyQuotes

Larry Mcmurtry

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    Americans don't want cowboys to be gay.

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    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    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.

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    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    I never met a soul in this world as normal as me.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    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.” ~spoken by Augustus McCrae

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    Listening to women ain't the fashion in this part of the country.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    Mystery is underrated, and understanding is overrated.

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    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    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.

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    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    Razzy was insulting me silently somehow.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    Self-parody is the first portent of age.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    Texas is rich in unredeemed dreams

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    The older the violin, the sweeter the music.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    Larry Mcmurtry

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

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    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.

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    Larry Mcmurtry

    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.