80+ Larry Mcmurtry Quotes On Education, Death And Writing

Larry McMurtry was an American novelist, essayist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove, which was adapted into a television miniseries. He also wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Larry Mcmurtry on life, education, love.

Top 10 Larry Mcmurtry Quotes

1. Self-parody is the first portent of age.
2. Men who didn’t know how to get on and off a horse would not be much use around a cow outfit.
3. Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.
4. Call’s gone to round up a dern bunch of cowboys so we can head out for Montana with a dern bunch of cows and suffer for the rest of our lives.
5. Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.
6. If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.
7. A woman's love is like the morning dew. It's just as likely to settle on a horse turd as a rose.
8. Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.
9. 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—and feisty gentlemen.
10. Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.

Larry Mcmurtry Short Quotes

• A man who wouldn't cheat for a poke don't want one bad enough. --Augustus "Gus" McCrae
• It's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.
• Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain't much of a crime.
• The older the violin, the sweeter the music.
• Americans don't want cowboys to be gay.
• If a warrior lacked wisdom, courage alone would not keep him alive for long.
• A man that will go along with six killings is making his escape a little slow.
• If I had a mind to rent pigs, I'd be mighty upset. A man that likes to rent pigs won't be stopped.
• But the English are different, and they don't know how to be other than different.
• You can scare off a lot of cowboys just by looking mean, I guess.

Larry Mcmurtry Quotes About Life

It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.” ~spoken by Augustus McCrae — Larry Mcmurtry

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. — Larry Mcmurtry

I'm sure partial to the evening,' Augustus said. 'The evening and the morning. If we just didn't have to have the rest of the dern day I'd be a lot happier. — Larry Mcmurtry

Larry Mcmurtry Quotes About People

The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings -- crowded, active, thick. But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow's horizons are vague and its demands are few. — Larry Mcmurtry

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. — Larry Mcmurtry

Americans' lack of passion for history is well known. History may not quite be bunk, as Henry Ford suggested, but there's no denying that, as a people, we sustain a passionate concentration on the present and the future. — Larry Mcmurtry

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

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

Larry Mcmurtry Famous Quotes And Sayings

I make my share of mistakes, but one I never make is to underestimate the power of things. People imbued from childhood with the myth of the primacy of feeling seldom like to admit they really want things as much as they might want love, but my career has convinced me that plenty of them do. And some want things a lot worse than they want love. — Larry Mcmurtry

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. — Larry Mcmurtry

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. — Larry Mcmurtry

The tradition I was born into was essentially nomadic, a herdsmen tradition, following animals across the earth. The bookshops are a form of ranching; instead of herding cattle, I herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters. — Larry Mcmurtry

WHEN AUGUSTUS CAME OUT on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over. — Larry Mcmurtry

He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men. — Larry Mcmurtry

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

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

I don't do well with changes in my routine. I read at least three newspapers a day, for example. I'm frustrated if for some reason I can't get ahold of all three. — Larry Mcmurtry

Books can accommodate the proximity of computers but it doesn't seem to work the other way around. Computers now literally drive out books from the place that should, by definition, be books' own home: the library. — Larry Mcmurtry

A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them. — Larry Mcmurtry

Call saw that everyone was looking at him, the hands and cowboys and townspeople alike. The anger had drained out of him, leaving him feeling tired. He didn't remember the fight, particularly, but people were looking at him as if they were stunned. He felt he should make some explanation, though it seemed to him a simple situation. "I hate a man that talks rude," he said. "I won't tolerate it. — Larry Mcmurtry

Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps. — Larry Mcmurtry

Texas is rich in unredeemed dreams — Larry Mcmurtry

Razzy was insulting me silently somehow. — Larry Mcmurtry

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. — Larry Mcmurtry

The Western notion of masculinity goes back a long way. It doesn’t allow for women, and it’s also racist - it doesn’t allow for other cultures. — Larry Mcmurtry

Live through it," Call said. "That's all we can do. — Larry Mcmurtry

From him to the stars, in all directions, there was only silence and emptiness. — Larry Mcmurtry

Uva uvum vivendo varia fit — Larry Mcmurtry

I never met a soul in this world as normal as me. — Larry Mcmurtry

It's really quite simple. Mr. Isinglass robbed my father, destroyed my mother, exiled my brothers, and ruined me. If I catch him asleep I'll kill him. I do hope you like this pudding. I had to ride quite a way to find the plums. — Larry Mcmurtry

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. — Larry Mcmurtry

Part of the trick of being happy is a refusal to allow oneself to become too nostalgic for the heady triumphs of one's youth. — Larry Mcmurtry

I think its a sickness to grieve too much for those who never cared a fig for you. — Larry Mcmurtry

Through my college years, topping that ridge had always given me a great sense of being home, but time had diminished the emotion and I had begun to suspect that home was less a place than an empty page. — Larry Mcmurtry

Nobody run off with her,” Roscoe said. "She just run off with herself, I guess. — Larry Mcmurtry

The only bookstore I had was the paperback rack at the drugstore. — Larry Mcmurtry

Most young dealers of the Silicon Chip Era regard a reference library as merely a waste of space. Old Timers on the West Coast seem to retain a fondness for reference books that goes beyond the practical. Everything there is to know about a given volume may be only a click away, but there are still a few of us who'd rather have the book than the click. A bookman's love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them. — Larry Mcmurtry

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. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two. — Larry Mcmurtry

They say money kinda melts when you take it across a border. — Larry Mcmurtry

-she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn't last long, once they became men. — Larry Mcmurtry

I suppose you set up reading the Good Book all night-spoken by Woodrow Call — Larry Mcmurtry

Mystery is underrated, and understanding is overrated. — Larry Mcmurtry

In times of crisis human beings don't have it in them to be rational. — Larry Mcmurtry

I once owned a collection of 77 novels that won the Pulitzer. The only good novel of the bunch was The Grapes of Wrath. — Larry Mcmurtry

Though loyal and able and brave, Pea had never displayed the slightest ability to learn from his experience, though his experience was considerable. Time and again he would walk up on the wrong side of a horse that was known to kick, and then look surprised when he got kicked. — Larry Mcmurtry

Nothing good ever comes without a price. — Larry Mcmurtry

The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight. — Larry Mcmurtry

The reason men are so awful is because some woman has spoiled them. — Larry Mcmurtry

Listening to women ain't the fashion in this part of the country. — Larry Mcmurtry

I don't see how being married could be any worse than listening to you talk for twenty years, but that still ain't much of a recommendation for it. — Larry Mcmurtry

You know Deets is like me - he's not one to quit on a garment just because it's got a little age - spoken by Augustus McCrae — Larry Mcmurtry

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. — Larry Mcmurtry

I hate rude behavior in a man,' he explained in his quiet, unassuming drawl. 'I won't tolerate it.' He politely tipped his hat, and rode away. — Larry Mcmurtry

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

Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters. — Larry Mcmurtry

I'm glad I've been wrong enough to keep in practice. . . You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it. If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it's bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day--that way they ain't usually much worse than a dry shave. — Larry Mcmurtry

There isn't a thought in my head I care to be alone with for more than five minutes. — Larry Mcmurtry

Certainly on the vast windy plain, there was plenty of nothing to be looked at. — Larry Mcmurtry

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. — Larry Mcmurtry

Death and worse happened on the plains. — Larry Mcmurtry

Life Lessons by Larry Mcmurtry

1. Larry Mcmurtry teaches us to be resilient in the face of adversity and to never give up on our dreams. He also encourages us to appreciate the beauty in the small moments of life, and to be thankful for the people and experiences that make us who we are.
2. He reminds us to take risks and to embrace change, as it can often lead to great opportunities and growth.
3. Finally, Larry Mcmurtry encourages us to always strive for excellence and to never settle for anything less than our best.