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If we know anything about man, it's that he's not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted.

Larry McMurtry

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Larry McMurtry
Age: 84 †
Born: 1936
Born: June 3
Died: 2021
Died: March 25
Author
Businessperson
Essayist
Historian
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Archer City
Texas
McMurtry
Larry
Larry Jeff McMurtry
Anyone
Common
Butcher
Seems
Resisted
Anything
Undesirable
Always
Butchers
Men
Pacific
Temptation
Considered

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Books can accommodate the proximity of computers but it doesn't seem to work the other way around. Computers now literally drive out books from the place that should, by definition, be books' own home: the library.
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If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.
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... people are always turning out to be tougher than I think they are.
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A woman's love is like the morning dew. It's just as likely to settle on a horse turd as a rose.
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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.
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Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.
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-she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn't last long, once they became men.
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I make my share of mistakes, but one I never make is to underestimate the power of things. People imbued from childhood with the myth of the primacy of feeling seldom like to admit they really want things as much as they might want love, but my career has convinced me that plenty of them do. And some want things a lot worse than they want love.
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Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.
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Americans don't want cowboys to be gay.
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A man that will go along with six killings is making his escape a little slow.
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Death and worse happened on the plains.
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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.
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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.
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I'm glad I've been wrong enough to keep in practice. . . You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it. If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it's bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day--that way they ain't usually much worse than a dry shave.
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The reason men are so awful is because some woman has spoiled them.
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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.
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No illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind, such as cars that won't start.
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Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain't much of a crime.
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Americans' lack of passion for history is well known. History may not quite be bunk, as Henry Ford suggested, but there's no denying that, as a people, we sustain a passionate concentration on the present and the future.
Larry McMurtry