Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

Ive seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.

When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.

To see God everywhere is to see Him nowhere.

The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before, no more, no less.

War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

The core of literature is the idea of tragedy... You don't really learn much from the good things that happen to you.

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.

Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing

The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it.

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this., New York Times, April 19, 1992]

This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up.

I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was... name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home.

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it.

I felt early on I wasn't going to be a respectable citizen.

He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.

Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.

It is not my experience that life's difficulties make people more charitable.

It may be that the life I desire for her no longer even exists, yet I know what she does not. That there is nothing to lose.

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable.

My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold, and anything else is just a waste of time.