Quotes from Thomas McGuane

If I get too old to write, or short-term memory loss - that was the one Philip Roth was worried about - if I got to that point, that would be terrible, because everything about my life has been streaming toward writing and having something to say. That would make me feel as though I were in an iron maiden of some kind.

Marriage is anti-romantic - husband and wife are terms like 'turkey' and 'goose.' Worse, they denote ownership.

One of the reasons I'm reluctant to start a novel is it's such an obsessive activity. You get in there, you don't know anything else while you're in there. And that's quite a sacrifice to make, especially for us old guys where time is kind of short. You don't want to disappear for a year; you want to be outdoors.

I've outlived my parents, and I've had some wonderful second chances in life. I feel remarkably uncheated.

I'm not considered as illegitimate as I once was. Because in a sense, I'm like lip cancer - I'm not going to go away.

It took me a long time to know enough about writing to really write short stories. You can't just immerse yourself, as you do in a novel, and see where everything goes. Novels are a very flexible, accommodating form. Short stories aren't.

I think anybody alert to the inspiration to write has to be kind of sensitized to the unexpected.

There's a view of Montana writing that seems stage-managed by the Chamber of Commerce - it's all about writers like A. B. Guthrie and Ivan Doig. It used to bother me that nobody had a scene where somebody was delivering a pizza.

Young anglers love new rivers the way they love the rest of their lives. Time does not seem to be of the essence and somewhere in the system is what they are looking for.

My parents and my sister died... very close together, and after that, I lost quite a bit of my sense of humor. Most of it I think has kind of come back, but I know there was a time when I didn't think things were funny anymore. I kind of think they're funny again.

I like Halldor Laxness and Machado de Assis - people who try to understand the human condition by looking at intimate pictures of human life.

Summertime in Montana, I become a monosyllabic baboon. I want to ride with the cowboys, go to brandings, doctor cattle, and train my horses. But in a few months, the snow starts to fly. The days become shorter; the yellow color of interior light becomes delicious. I look at my shelves, and every book just glows, and I want to be inside of that.

I'm very grateful for what I have. I'm old enough that I can mort out at any minute without any sense of regret at all. That's not true. I might look back and think I wish I hadn't been so selfish when my kids were smaller. But I'm not overwhelmed by regret.

I'm a really a fanatical reviser, and there comes a point where I have to declare a truce with the text, or I'll keep fooling with it forever.

I had a passionate zest for Key West life in all of its little details. I'm not sure why or where that came from, but I was so excited to be there.

My twenties were entirely taken up with literature. Entirely.

After fifty years of living, it occurs to me that the most significant thing that people do is go to work, whether it is to go to work on their novel or at the assembly plant or fixing somebody's teeth.

It don't do you no nevermind to tell nobody nothing.

Not long ago, in response to a spell of insomnia, I learned some of the principles of meditation, to empty my mind piece by piece. It was like the old game of jacks - cautiously lifting each jack clear of its neighbor until only the empty background remained.

Something had gone amiss with men, and the weak ones were dangerous.

I'm a neurotic fiction writer who'd like to be a cowboy.

My friends seem to think that an hour and a half effort a day is all they need to bring to the altar to make things work for them. I couldn't do that. I thought that if you didn't work at least as hard as the guy who runs a gas station, then you had no right to hope for achievement. You certainly had to work all day, every day.

They were about a foot tall, and something about their matching size and identical bandit masks, coupled with their misjudgment of aspens as an escape route, gave me a sense of real glee at the originality of things.

As I face new water, I always ask myself if I ought to fish with a nymph or not. Presumably you don't walk directly into rising trout. Camus said that the only serious question is whether or not to commit suicide. This is rather like the nymph question. It takes weight, a weighted fly, split shot. Casting becomes a matter of spitting this mess out and being orderly about it.