Quotes from Larry McMurtry

One reason I've hung on to book selling is that it's progressive—the opposite of writing, pretty much. Eventually all novelists, if they persist too long, get worse. No reason to name names, since no one is spared. Writing great fiction involves some combination of energy and imagination that cannot be energized or realized forever. Strong talents can simply exhaust their gift, and they do.

And the blue pigs walked all the way to Montana just to be eaten. Life ain't for sissies, as Augustus might have said.

He thought living in a place where there were eagles to watch might encourage some pretty good dreams.

I'd like to see you think the roof back on that barn," Call said.

Show business imposes its own strict temporality: no matter how many CDs or DVDs we own, it would still have been better to have been there, to have seen the living performers in the richness of their being and to have participated, however briefly, in the glory of their performance.

He remembered the cold nights in their Arkansas cabin when he was a boy—how his mother piled quilts on top of him and his brothers, how peaceful it seemed under the quilts. Then it seemed like sleep was one of the most wonderful things in life.

It was wearying, trying to adjust to all the paces life required.

Her own folly amused her: she had once thought of herself as smart—but look at where she was.

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

The skinny ones last longer than the fat ones," Louisa said. "You'll probably last till you're about sixty.

He had just begun to realize how hard it was to get from day to day if one felt hopeless.

That's one of the only things I look forward to about an evening like this, you know -someone to drink tea with at the end of it. For all I know, the whole point of civilization is to provide one with someone to drink tea with at the end of an evening. Otherwise you have no one with whom to talk over whatever may have happened during the evening. Dinner parties are often more fun to talk about than they are to attend - at least they aren't complete until they've been discussed.

In the vastness of the desert, each reduction of the group made them realize how small they were, how puny, in relation to the space they were traveling through.

Well, we've never had a divorce in our family, Aurora said, but if we have to have one, Tomas is a good place to start.

It struck her that endings were never as you would expect them to be.

A chain of follies had put him there: Call's abrupt decision to become a cattleman and his own decision, equally abrupt, to try and rescue a girl foolish enough to be taken in by Jake Spoon. None of it was sensible, yet he had to admit there was something about such follies that he liked.

I won't tolerate vanity in a man, though I will in a woman.

It was often that way with women, it seemed. One minute Lorie would be drilling holes in him with her eyes, and the next minute she and Clarie would be combing one another's hair and singing tunes.

I don't sing about myself. I sing about life. I am happy, but life is sad. The songs don't belong to me . . . They belong to those who hear them.

When the lightning struck, the whole prairie would be bathed for a second in white light.

There was said to be measuring of penises at the Orchid, but was it true and if so what did that mean?

Afterwards the members of the little war party felt fine. Torturing whites was a splendid way to spend the afternoon.

Of course she teased the girls, but it was not the same as having a grown man to work on—she had often felt like pinching Bob for being so stolid. July was no better—in fact, he and Bob were cut from the same mold, a strong but unimaginative mold.

They probably think the sun won't come up unless you're there to allow it.