Larry McMurtry Quotes

“Larry didn’t go to the big cattle drive in the sky. He’s prowling for rare books at the big garage and estate sales in the sky,” Leslie Silko said.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“Benjamin Moser called his books “masterpieces. His characters were so vivid, his plots so intriguing, his language both so natural and so refined, that I came to regard him, book by book, with something approaching awe … I’m not a crier, and those books made me cry.” Before he died, Bill Wittliff said, “Larry took us out of our literary adolescence to a beginning maturity.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“And at the end of the day, his fellow scribbler Nelson Algren would neatly encapsulate nomadic wisdom: “Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never play cards with a man named Doc, and never sleep with a woman whose problems are worse than your own.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“he finally acceded to the need, long urged on him by Khristal Collins, to sell books on the internet. To his surprise, China proved a quick and steady customer. “We had a lot of good porcelain books. Sold every one of them to China,” he marveled. “I mean, these were thousand-dollar books. They’re not cheap. I guess they are really serious about porcelain in China.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“A heavily tattooed woman from Tyler, Texas, convinced that, in the future, books would simply be novelty items, bought a stack to sell in a booth she owned in a Dallas marketplace. She traded in oddities such as “tattooed furniture and skateboard decks.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“Like a giant rat, the internet had eaten the bottom out of the antiquarian bookselling trade in two specific ways. First, dealers stopped scouting for books because everything they wanted was posted online (never mind the treasures they didn’t know they needed, awaiting them on the road—the whole reason for scouting in the first place).”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“McMurtry had long been fascinated by the fact that American westerns had always been popular in Europe—maybe more so than in the United States. (Rudolf Muus, a Norwegian, wrote over five hundred westerns, bested by the Frenchman George Fronval, weighing in with more than six hundred tales. By contrast, Zane Grey managed only seventy-eight.)”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“But when had America ever been reasonable about guns? “More people died outside that Safeway on a Saturday morning … right up the road from where I write … than died in the famous and endlessly re-enacted shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, also not very far down the road,” he wrote.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“The following afternoon, in a public discussion at the Central Library, he repeated his belief that book culture was dying. “I fear for libraries,” he said. “The computers are marching into libraries now and the books are being sent away.” Computers “can’t bring us love, endow us with grace … they can’t exempt us from death.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“He spoke haltingly of the death of the book. Dutton’s Books, one of LA’s largest independent bookstores, had permanently closed its doors, just that day. McMurtry said that, in 1963, when he’d first arrived in Los Angeles, there were 115 secondhand bookstores between Long Beach and Van Nuys. All gone. He said he could still name seventy-five of them. He started to list a few. He choked up after the first three. “Even thinking about them makes me cry,” he apologized. “It makes me very sad to come here now.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“It appalled her that the culture birds in Washington and New York did not seem to know whom they had in their midst. “People do not always recognize … the intellectual heft of Larry,” she said. “People don’t put him in the same category as a New Yorker essayist. But he is.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“Trying to make small talk with customers, he’d say things like, “I had an expensive education, but I learned most of what I know in secondhand bookshops.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“In London, they visited Cecil Court, a renowned booksellers’ street, but were disappointed by the fare. In Cheltenham, they bought forty-five books by Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“If economy interested me I would have written a short book. In fact I find economy a fucking bore, whether it be literary, sexual, or monetary. It bespeaks the tight-ass … it may be a virtue in homeowners and a word beloved of pedagogues, but it’s hardly the mistress for a novelist.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“[Sadly,] in Washington we don’t go in for elusive statements. We are not particularly well-read and therefore even the deft allusions are lost.” McMurtry would have put it another way: “The higher a monkey climbs, the more it shows its ass.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“[I]t is a charming thing to watch,” when “moviemakers have ‘ideas,’” McMurtry said. “The delight these ‘ideas’ occasion, when they finally appear, approximates what an ardent 89-year-old lover might feel upon discovering that he has an erection. Unfortunately, the promise of these ‘ideas’ (like that of not a few erections) is something that is often appreciated only by the possessor.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“Unfortunately good writers are made in empty rooms with typewriters in them.” He concluded that “half the bookshops in the country are managed by failed novelists with bad consciences. I had rather not join them.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“The sixties circus was about to hit town, horns ablare, heralded by the publications of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Horseman, Pass By, Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“McMurtry credited him with writing one of the finest sentences ever scribbled by a Texan, a warning about the challenge of surviving in the Lone Star State: “Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“As he leaves, he will hear “the music of departure,” as McMurtry wrote elsewhere, discussing his own farewell to early youth, the sound of a “god almost out of hearing.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“Not long after I entered the pastures of the empty page I realized that the place where all my stories start is the heart faced suddenly with the loss of its country, its customary and legendary range.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“I’m in no way envious of Paris in the twenties because we had Palo Alto in the sixties.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“(“One reason I’m comfortable in dusty bookshops is that I have no sartorial interests,” McMurtry said.)”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“Residents raised fattened pigs, setting them free at night to clean the streets.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“I’ve seen cowboying die, and also bookselling, to a large degree. And both those things sadden me.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“The bookshops are a form of ranching,” he said. “Instead of herding cattle, [booksellers] herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraphlike clusters.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“The novel offers no startling revelations about how to cope with grief or sadness or aging. It offers what a novel can, a rich, full experience of an individual mind. [re: Larry McMurtry, Duane's Depressed]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“Working on novels, he reaffirmed his belief that nothing important could really be explained; it could only be experienced in the daily clutter of stuff that fiction was so good at cataloguing. [re: Larry McMurtry]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“But I had ceased to be that person; I acted him or impersonated him as best I could, for the benefit of loved ones." [Larry McMurtry]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“In interviews, McMurtry frequently mentioned that whenever he wrote a novel now, he paused to consider which young bankable actors could play his characters in a movie, and if he could think of none, he would change his characters to fit Hollywood's realities. Such comments sounded like further attempts to disabuse his readers from clinging to nostalgic notions of the Novel as High Art.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life