Larry McMurtry
Larry McMurtry
Larry Jeff McMurtryis an American novelist, essayist, bookseller and screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the old West or in contemporary Texas. His novels include Horseman, Pass By, The Last Picture Showand Terms of Endearment, which were adapted into films earning 26 Academy Award nominations. His 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove was adapted into a television miniseries that earned 18 Emmy Award nominations, with the other three novels in his Lonesome Dove series adapted into three more...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth3 June 1936
CityArcher City, TX
CountryUnited States of America
Listening to women ain't the fashion in this part of the country.
Texas is rich in unredeemed dreams
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.
Self-parody is the first portent of age.
There isn't a thought in my head I care to be alone with for more than five minutes.
Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.
Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.
If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A woman's love is like the morning dew. It's just as likely to settle on a horse turd as a rose.
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.