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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.

Cormac McCarthy

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Cormac McCarthy
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: July 20
Novelist
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Providence
Rhode Island
Charles McCarthy
Work
Creative
Something
Pain
Arrangement
Way
Often
Arrangements
Good
Anything
Nuts
May
Driving
Back
Driven
Done
Wouldn
Writing
Head

More quotes by Cormac McCarthy

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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.
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The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.
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For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?
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It's the tide. It's the dismal tide. It's not the one thing.
Cormac McCarthy
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At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned
Cormac McCarthy
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The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before, no more, no less.
Cormac McCarthy
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Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.
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No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. 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.
Cormac McCarthy
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Scared money can’t win and a worried man can’t love.
Cormac McCarthy
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There is no greater monster than reason.
Cormac McCarthy
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I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.
Cormac McCarthy
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The cooler days have brought a wistful mood upon him. The smell of coalsmoke in the air at night. Old times, dead years. For him such memories are bitter ones.
Cormac McCarthy
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Usually, you don't know where a book comes from ... it's just there, some kind of an itch that you can't quite scratch.
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He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it.
Cormac McCarthy
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In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.
Cormac McCarthy
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Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.
Cormac McCarthy
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The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it.
Cormac McCarthy
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Hard weather, says the old man. So let it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will wash rain like the stones.
Cormac McCarthy
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I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that's just about the best kind of luck you can have.
Cormac McCarthy
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Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.
Cormac McCarthy