Quotes from Larry McMurtry

There would be a trial, of course. But I had watched a few trials in Thalia, and I had seen people a lot dumber than Hud get away with a lot worse than what he did.

Once started, love couldn't easily be stopped.

Razzy was insulting me silently somehow.

no medicine man or wise man knew why one man died and another lived. Wise men themselves often died before fools, and cowards before men who were brave.

He said there were going to be literary parties. I tried to imagine a literary party and was unable to. It was a very abstract effort, like trying to imagine a triangle or a cube. Wearing a suit made me feel even more abstract. I had a mental picture of me inside my suit, inside a party, inside a building, inside San Francisco. I didn't know what I was doing, inside so many things that were unlike me.

figure the reason you don't have much to say is you probably never met a man who liked to hear a woman talk.

A man that will go along with six killings is making his escape a little slow.

Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty, the way they were one Saturday morning in late November.

Pussyfooting is a vice I have been concerned to avoid.

I just got gang-egged, or egg-banged or something. --Sheriff Toots Burns.

The thing that Buffalo Hump was most grateful for, as he rode into the emptiness, was the knowledge that in the years of his youth and manhood he had drawn the lifeblood of so many enemies. He had been a great killer; it was his way and the way of his people; no one in his tribe had killed so often and so well. The killings were good to remember, as he rode his old horse deeper into the llano, away from all the places where people came.

And it's the only whorehouse in town. They say if you can sprout up twelve inches of dick you get to fuck free.

He didn't tell Newt all he knew. He didn't tell him that even when life seemed easy, it kept on getting harder.

People got opinions, that's all they've got.

Why hell yes, Joe Bob! A cripple can always get himself a wooden leg, or a glass eye, or a metal hook for a hand, or any of that mess -- but there ain't no known substitute for a big dick. I guess you is out of luck!

Well, I got to admit I still like a fight," Augustus said. "They sharpen the wits. The only other thing that does that is talking to women, which is usually more dangerous.

You ought to take more chances, I said. I took too many earlier, she said. I'm sorry.

The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over the horizon the chaparral seemed to be spotted with diamonds. A bush in the little backyard was filled with the little rainbows as the sun touched the dew.

As she was finishing her song, the notes dipped down low—they carried a sadness that was more than a sadness at the death of men; rather it was a sadness at the lives of men, and of women. It reminded those who heard the rising, dipping notes, of notes of hopes that had been born, and, yet, died; of promise, and the failure of promise.

I sometimes think the sexual organs were put there to keep the human race humble, she said. They've certainly kept me humble.

You're the only man I know whose brain don't work unless it's in the shade.

Several times in his life he had felt an intense desire to start over, to somehow turn back the clock of his life to a point where he might, if he were careful, avoid the many mistakes he had made the first time around.

See this page of paper? It's blank," Scull said. "That, sir, is the most frightening battlefield in the world: the blank page. I mean to fill this paper with decent sentences, sir—this page and hundreds like it. Let me tell you, Colonel, it's harder than fighting Lee. Why, it's harder than fighting Napoleon. It requires unremitting attention

i'd hate to read all these books...that much reading could put your eyes out.