880 Quotes by Cormac McCarthy

You are either born a writer or you are not.

It just sounds like superstition to me.And what is that?Superstition?Yes.Well. I guess it's when you believe in things that dont exist.Such as tomorrow? Or yesterday?Such as the dreams of somebody you dreamt. Yesterday was here and tomorrow's comin.

Live by yourself and you bound to talk yourself and when ye commence that folks start it up that you're light in the head. But I reckon it's all right to talk to a dog since most folks do even if a dog don't understand and cain't answer if he did.

How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said.I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it.

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.

Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way.[Interview, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2009]

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.[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]

Men do not turn from God so easily. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot e fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of him.

It is personal. That's what an education does. It makes the world personal.