LARRY MCMURTRY

Self-parody is the first portent of age.

Members of the Academy are mostly urban people. We are an urban nation. We are not a rural nation. It's not easy even to get a rural story made.

No illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind, such as cars that won't start.

A man that ain't willin' to cheat for a poke don't want it bad enough.

Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.

True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends' boyfriends - and he accepts it.

If we know anything about man, it's that he's not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.

One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider's outsider.

Americans don't want cowboys to be gay.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

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

Occasionally the very youngness of the young moved him to charity--they had no sense of the swiftness of life, nor of its limits. The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour.

... people are always turning out to be tougher than I think they are.

I remember that the single most vicious letter I ever read was the letter Hemingway wrote Scribners when they asked him to give a blurb for From Here to Eternity. It's there, in the Selected Letters for all to read, an example of a once great writer at his very worst. I doubt that he ever forgave Scribners for publishing James Jones in the first place. War, as Hemingway saw it, belonged to him.

It's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.

Obviously, where art has it over life is in the matter of editing. Life can be seen to suffer from a drastic lack of editing. It stops too quick, or else it goes on too long. Worse, its pacing is erratic. Some chapters are little more than a few sentences in length, while others stretch into volumes. Life, for all its raw talent, has little sense of structure. It creates amazing textures, but it can't be counted on for snappy beginnings or good endings either. Indeed, in many cases no ending is provided at all.

Uva uvum vivendo varia fit

Nothing good ever comes without a price.

You can scare off a lot of cowboys just by looking mean, I guess.

For the past several centuries the bonding power of the family dinner table has been one of the few constants, and now it's binding no more. The potency of the media is now stronger than that of the family. The wonder is that families still exist at all, since the forces of modern life mainly all pull people away from a family centered way of life.

Mystery is underrated, and understanding is overrated.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analagous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.

People would be bored shitless if they had to love only the good in someone they care about.