Quotes from Larry McMurtry

My main skills are talking and cooking biscuits," Augustus said. "And getting drunk on the porch.

His purpose was to get done what needed to be done, and what needed to be done was simple, if not easy.

He didn't feel sad. The one thing he knew about Texas was that he was lucky to be leaving it alive—and, in fact, he had a long way to go before he could be sure of accomplishing that much.

the moment indifference took over, life began to subside. Few men rose out of it: most lost all impulse toward activity and ended by offering death at least a halfhearted welcome.

It was a weakness, but he could not bear to disappoint women, even if it was ultimately for their own good.

You should marry me, he said. I will be good to you. I am not like these men. I have manners. You would see how kind I would be. I would never leave you. You could have an easy life.

There seem to be no way he could stop anything that was happening, although it all felt wrong.

If you're planning on dying today I hope you dig your grave first.

He was annoyed with his mind—it would be a lot easier to do his task well if his mind would just behave and not keep making him scared.

In the last year or two he had not only grown indifferent to company, he had begun to find it irritating.

That things were mysterious did not make them less valuable.

Talk's the way to kill it. Anything gets boring if you talk about it enough, even death.

Everyone who came to see him asked questions that were either stupid or impertinent. Better to see no one than to see fools.

The best to do with a death was to move on from it.

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

It didn't do to ignore men. The majority of them were harmless, with nothing worse than a low capacity to irritate—they were worse than chiggers but not as bad as bedbugs, in her view.

Give Call a grievance, however silly, and he would save it like money.

woman's love is like the morning dew, it's just as apt to settle on a horse turd as it is on a rose.

Maude Jones, had killed herself with a shotgun one morning, leaving a note which merely said, 'Can't stand listening to this wind no more.

He ought to let the past keep its glow and not try to mix it with what he had in the present.

Ikey had passed his seventieth year and considered anyone under fifty to be callow, at best.

passing insults back and forth, as if they were biscuits.

Bernard Berenson once said that the formation of the great library he assembled at I Tatti was his greatest achievement. I feel much the same way about the library (as distinct from the bookshop) that I've put together in Archer City. The collection—or, more properly, the accumulation—now numbers about 28,000 volumes. If I were beamed up tomorrow my library would attest to the fact that a reader had once been there. -- On Rereading, NYRB July 14, 2005

the seven of them rode for two hours into country that seemed to contain nothing except itself.