Top 100 Quotes About Cormac Mccarthy
#1. 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]
Cormac McCarthy
#2. Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.
Tommy Lee Jones
#3. I always say, I'm certain I changed 'Watchmen' less than the Coen brothers changed 'No Country for Old Men.' I'm certain of it. But you don't hear the Cormac McCarthy fans, like, up in arms about it. They should be. It's like an amazing Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
Zack Snyder
#4. Nicholas Sparks recently went on record as saying he is a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy. This is true in the same sense that I am a better novelist than William Shakespeare.
Roger Ebert
#5. The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago.
Karen Thompson Walker
#6. A writer who renders the brutal actions of men in excruciating detail, seldom applying the anesthetic of psychology, [Cormac] McCarthy would much rather orate than confide.
Richard B. Woodward
#7. The kind of stuff I usually read is a bit more on the literary side, like books that I think are influential in the sense that they're doing pulpy subject matter in a refined way. Like 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy; I loved that book.
Isaac Marion
#8. One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
Leslie Fiedler
#9. No one has a name in 'The Road.' Like Cormac McCarthy's novel from which it's adapted, 'The Road' features characters such as the man, the boy, the wife, the old man and the veteran.
Garret Dillahunt
#10. I'm a huge Cormac McCarthy fan and have read every book of his.
James Franco
#11. Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Jim Crace, Arthur C. Clarke, Russell Hoban, Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Walter M. Miller, Tim O'Brien, Will Self and Marcel Theroux,
Bill Bryson
#12. 'Suttree' is a fat one, a book with rude, startling power and a flood of talk. Much of it takes place on the Tennessee River, and Cormac McCarthy, who has written 'The Orchard Keeper' and other novels, gives us a sense of river life that reads like a doomed 'Huckleberry Finn.'
Jerome Charyn
#13. By far my most popular novel, and one that allows me to join the small company of "respectable" writers whose fiction deals with the American West: Cormac McCarthy, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lee and a handful of others,
Larry McMurtry
#15. Gray vines coiled leftward in this northern hemisphere, what winds them shapes the dogwhelk's shell. Weeds sprouted from cinder and brick.
Cormac McCarthy
#16. Whatever voice spoke him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity. a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath.
Cormac McCarthy
#17. Somewhere in the world is the most invincible man. Just as somewhere is the most vulnerable.
Cormac McCarthy
#18. All patched up out of parts and lowslung and bumping over the ruts. Filled with old lanky country boys with long cocks and big feet.
Cormac McCarthy
#19. And he no longer cared to tell which were things done and which dreamt.
Cormac McCarthy
#20. The voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such things as lives in silence themselves.
Cormac McCarthy
#21. Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he.
Cormac McCarthy
#22. There are other good guys. You said so. Yes.
So where are they? They're hiding. Who are they hiding from? From each other.
Cormac McCarthy
#23. You can be patriotic and still believe that some things cost more than what they're worth. Ask
Cormac McCarthy
#25. Those who cannot see must rely upon what has gone before. If I do not wish to appear so foolish as to drink from an empty glass I must remember whether I have drained it or not.
Cormac McCarthy
#26. John Grady looked at the table. The paper cat stepped thin and slant among the shapes of cats thereon. He looked up again. Yessir, he said. Just me and him.
Cormac McCarthy
#27. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.
Cormac McCarthy
#29. A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done.
Cormac McCarthy
#30. Where do we go when we die? he said.
- I don't know, the man said. Where are we now?
Cormac McCarthy
#31. Life is a memory, then it is nothing. All law is writ in a seed.
Cormac McCarthy
#33. Dwindling slowly on the road behind him like some storybook peddler from an antique time, dark and bent and spider thin and soon to vanish forever.
Cormac McCarthy
#36. There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.
Cormac McCarthy
#37. Yellow leaves were falling all through the forest and the river was filled with them, shuttling and winking, golden leaves that rushed like poured coins in the tailwater. A perishable currency, forever renewed.
Cormac McCarthy
#39. I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.
Cormac McCarthy
#42. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that don't.
Cormac McCarthy
#43. His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel.
Cormac McCarthy
#44. He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.
Cormac McCarthy
#45. Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.
Cormac McCarthy
#46. You know that the things you put it your head stay there, right?'
'Yeah. But you remember some things, don't you?'
'Yeah. You remember the things you want to forget and forget the things you want to remember.
Cormac McCarthy
#47. It's a mess, aint it Sheriff?
If it aint it'll do till a mess gets here.
Cormac McCarthy
#48. They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey.
Cormac McCarthy
#49. Love makes men foolish. I speak as a victim myself. We are taken out of our own care and then it remains to be seen only if fate will show to us some share of mercy. Or little. Or none.
Cormac McCarthy
#50. The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element.
Cormac McCarthy
#51. Your brother is young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy. Perhaps you believe this also?
Cormac McCarthy
#52. You go back home and everything you wished was different is still the same and everything you wished was the same is different.
Cormac McCarthy
#53. He could see the truck in the moonlight at the top of the rise. He looked off to one side of it to see it the better. There was someone standing beside it. Then they were gone. There is no description of a fool, he said, that you fail to satisfy. Now you're goin to die.
Cormac McCarthy
#54. I felt early on I wasn't going to be a respectable citizen.
Cormac McCarthy
#55. Our enemies ... seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him.
Cormac McCarthy
#56. There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.
Cormac McCarthy
#57. I knew that courage came with less struggle for some than for others but I believed that anyone who desired it could have it.
Cormac McCarthy
#58. He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.
Cormac McCarthy
#59. The uncle lit up and blew smoke in a thin blue viper's breath toward the window. It coiled and diffused in the yellow light. He smiled. I'd like to have a dollar for every time I quit, he said.
Cormac McCarthy
#60. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.
Cormac McCarthy
#61. He tried to read her heart in her handclasp but he knew nothing.
Cormac McCarthy
#62. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
Cormac McCarthy
#63. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He
Cormac McCarthy
#64. There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn't about death. He wasn't sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or goodness. Things that he'd no longer any way to think about at all.
Cormac McCarthy
#65. It is not my experience that life's difficulties make people more charitable.
Cormac McCarthy
#66. The wind sounded of Mother Earth's forsaken and abandoned cries.
Cormac McCarthy
#67. The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.
Cormac McCarthy
#68. You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else.
Cormac McCarthy
#69. I will do what I promised." He whispered. "No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone.
Cormac McCarthy
#70. He said that that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is only the picture of the world in men's hearts. He said that the world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all things within it.
Cormac McCarthy
#71. There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.
Cormac McCarthy
#72. He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.
Cormac McCarthy
#74. Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.
Cormac McCarthy
#75. A forest fire was making its way along the tinderbox ridges above them, flaring and shimmering against the overcast like the northern lights. Cold as it was he stood there a long time. The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember.
Cormac McCarthy
#76. Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I'm gettin old.
Cormac McCarthy
#78. The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.
Cormac McCarthy
#79. I've no sympathy with people to whom things happen. It may be that their luck is bad, but is that to count in their favor? I
Cormac McCarthy
#80. When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.
Cormac McCarthy
#81. In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.
Cormac McCarthy
#82. Those who travel desert places do indeed meet with creatures surpassing all description.
Cormac McCarthy
#83. Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.
Cormac McCarthy
#84. She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.
Cormac McCarthy
#85. What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenhearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.
Cormac McCarthy
#86. The razorous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin.
Cormac McCarthy
#87. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.
Cormac McCarthy
#88. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt.
Cormac McCarthy
#89. When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.
Cormac McCarthy
#91. I don't mean to upset you, but reflective men often find themselves at a certain remove from the realities of life.
Cormac McCarthy
#92. Like some scurrilous king stripped of his vestiture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die.
Cormac McCarthy
#93. God it set them yappin on the slope like dogs and he turns to us, the judge, with that smile of his, and he says: Gentlemen. That was all he said.
Cormac McCarthy
#94. In a world darksome as this'n I believe a blind man ort to be better sighted than most.
Cormac McCarthy
#95. Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.
Cormac McCarthy
#96. Always so deliberate, hardly surprised by the most outlandish advents. A creation perfectly evolved to meet its own end. They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn.
Cormac McCarthy
#97. No man is give leave of that voice. The kid spat into the fire and bent to his work. I aint heard no voice, he said. When it stops, said Tobin, you'll know you've heard it all your life.
Cormac McCarthy
#98. Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact.
Cormac McCarthy
#99. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing.
Cormac McCarthy
#100. He sounded like a man with a mouthful of marbles, articulating his goatbone underjaw laboriously, the original one having been shot away.
Cormac McCarthy
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
