Quotes from Thomas McGuane

Telling people to relax is not as aggressive as shooting them, but it's up there.

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

I may be the wrong person for my life.

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

We both liked children; we just didn't want any ourselves. There were children everywhere, and we saw no reason to start our own brand. Young couples plunge into parenthood and about half the time they end up with some ghastly problem on their hands. We thought we'd leave that to others.

Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana.

That food was so bad I can't wait for it to become a turd and leave me.

The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul, is that at some point you buy a ticket too.

I considered the wonder of the things that befell me, convinced that my life was the best omelet you could make with a chainsaw. -- Panama

By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.

They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics.

After the long time of going together and the mutual trust that had grown out of that time, Payne had occasion to realize that no mutual trust had grown out of the long time they had gone together.

They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics. Szabo often wished that he could be as well adjusted as Melinda's family, but he would have had to be medicated to pursue her list of pleasures.

In Oakland, he saw two slum children sword fighting on a slag heap. In Palo Alto, a puffy fop in bursting jodhpurs shouted from the door of a luxurious stable, "My horse is soiled!" While one chilly evening in Union Square he listened to a wild-eyed young woman declaim that she had seen delicate grandmothers raped by Kiwanis zombies, that she had seen Rotarian blackguards bludgeoning Easter bunnies in a coal cellar, that she had seen Irving Berlin buying an Orange Julius in Queens.

She ate her breakfast in silence, then drove downtown in weather so lowering the streetlights seemed decapitated. This was when you could discover if your preparations for winter were adequate, and if you were ready for the restrictions of movement and light that were about to be upon you.

But it was as if a tiny animal living in the corner of my mind, smaller than a mouse, smaller than an ant, and unobtrusive even considering its size, was saying, 'Bullshit.

Napoleon said that if it weren't for religion the poor would kill the rich. This may be all you needed to know about any human community. The churches were the real police stations, the real keepers of law and order.

My life was the best omelette you could make with a chainsaw

We want a little light to live by. A start somewhere. Little steps for little feet. Or even something commanding, scriptural or mighty. I myself am discouraged to finding a hot lead on the Altogether. Like every child of the century deluded enough to keep his head out of the noose, I expect God's Mercy in the end. Nevertheless, I frequently feel that anybody's refusal to commit suicide is a little fey. Walking about as though nothing were wrong is just too studied for the alert

Quinn wanted to make her see that people didn't live like this; but what was the use. No one was going to get her away from Bird Man out there.

he'd paid for should have led me to greater abstraction, but while it's true that the farther you get from an actual product the better your chances for economic success, I and many of my classmates wanted more physical evidence of our efforts.

He paused long enough for me to consider how wonderful life could be when it had great literature-style items, such as coincidence and fate and elegant ironies.

I think he was just doing his best, getting along by going along with my mother, whose piety and evangelical fever had preoccupied her family since the last century. She knew no other world - God the Tyrant and supplicant humanity crawling on its belly to be forgiven for sins they never knew they'd committed. 'It's no sense defying the LORD,' she told me. 'He's got all the coons up one tree.

I like brisket way too well, and I never seem to get it quite like I want it, though this time I'm close. I try to smoke it long enough to start the neighbors complaining. Then I know I'm on the right track.