381 Quotes by Larry McMurtry

He liked to get off by himself, a mile or so from camp, and listen to the country, not the men.

Great readers (are) those who know early that there is never going to be time to read all there is to read, but do their darnedest anyway.

It was something he had always done - moved apart, so he could be alone and think things or a little.

Bernard Berenson once said that the formation of the great library he assembled at I Tatti was his greatest achievement. I feel much the same way about the library (as distinct from the bookshop) that I’ve put together in Archer City. The collection—or, more properly, the accumulation—now numbers about 28,000 volumes. If I were beamed up tomorrow my library would attest to the fact that a reader had once been there.-- "On Rereading," NYRB July 14, 2005

It's just that it's fearsome for a man to have a woman start thinking right in front of him. It always leads to trouble.

The thought cross his mind that he ought to have married her and not gone rambling. If he had, he wouldn't be in such a fix. But he felt little fear; just an overpowering fatigue. Life had slipped out of line. It was unfair, it was too bad, but he couldn't find the energy to fight it any longer.

In the whole two years of their marriage she had never said anything similar, anything to indicate that she felt their being together was something less than a part of natural law.

You should bring your wife here, she said. There are a lot of guys around. Somebody would take her away from you and when you got over it you'd be a lot happier.

Indeed, looking back on her twenty-four years of marriage to Rudyard—something, admittedly, that she seldom did—Aurora could not remember a single thing that had been his fault, unless it was Emma, and even that was questionable.