Literary Birthday – 3 June – Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry was born on 3 June 1936 and died on 25 March 2021.

Larry McMurtry Quotes

1. You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.
2. Most of my books start with an ending. Then I go backwards and write towards the ending.
3. If I’m writing, I sit down and write five or 10 pages, depending upon how many pages a day I’ve decided to do for that particular writing project. No more and no less.
4. One thing I don’t do is read fiction while writing fiction. It interferes with my imagination.
5. It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author’s affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much energy as one pushes them through their lives.
6. I suppose the fact that I’ve written 41 books on a manual typewriter. That might be distinctive, in the age of computers.
7. I think the printed book is in danger. It will have a residual presence for a while, but not forever. It’s a revolution, as far as I’m concerned. Email, for example, constitutes a revolutionary form of correspondence.
8. I can write characters that major actors want to play, and that’s how movies get made
9. Life is inconsistent. Art is inconsistent. You work in the same vein for a lot of years, there are gonna be times when you like it better than other times. I think it’s true for any profession.
10. Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look – historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.
11. A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.
12. The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.

Larry McMurtry was an American novelist, essayist, bookseller, and screenwriter whose work was mostly set in the old West or in contemporary Texas. During a career spanning six decades, he wrote more than thirty novels, numerous essays and memoirs, and approximately fifty screenplays. He was best known for his novel Terms of Endearment, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove, and for co-writing the adapted screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. Lonesome Dove was adapted into a television miniseries and both Terms of Endearment and Brokeback Mountain won Academy Awards. He also owned and operated bookstores, including one in his hometown of Archer City, Texas, which he transformed into a ‘book town’. In April 2006, McMurtry was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. He wrote Books: A Memoir in 2008, Literary Life: A Second Memoir in 2009, and Hollywood: A Third Memoir in 2010. In 2014, he received the National Humanities Medal.

Source for quotes / Source for image: Douglas Peel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Larry_McMurtry_Photo_Last_Picture_Show_1966.png

by Amanda Patterson

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