You are either born a writer or you are not. - Cormac McCarthy
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.['s Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992] - Cormac McCarthy
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.[Interview, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2009] - Cormac McCarthy
This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan's headless body floated anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the shoulderblades in clerical black, silent rider to the sea. - Cormac McCarthy
A man is always right to pursue the thing he loves.No matter even if it kills him?I think so. Yes. No matter what. - Cormac McCarthy
This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon. - Cormac McCarthy
Life is a memory, then it is nothing. All law is writ in a seed. - Cormac McCarthy
Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing. - Cormac McCarthy
The freedom of birds is an insult to me. - Cormac McCarthy
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
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
The names of entities that have the power to constrain us change with time. Convention and authority are replaced by infirmity. But my attitude toward them has not changed. Has not changed. - Cormac McCarthy
My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time. - Cormac McCarthy
Harrogate saw them going along Blount Avenue Sunday morning. They wore outfits all cut from the same bolt of cloth and in the church pew standing six across they looked like a strip of gaudy wallpaper cut into those linked dolls madfolk pass their time in fashioning. - Cormac McCarthy
A big lemoncolored cat watched him from the top of a woodstove. He turned his head to see it better and it elongated itself like hot taffy down the side of the stove and vanished headfirst in the earth without a sound. - Cormac McCarthy
His head was pounding and his vision skewed in some way and he was vaguely amazed at being alive and not sure that it was worth it. - Cormac McCarthy
It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God - who knows all that can be known - seems powerless to change. - Cormac McCarthy
They camped that night on the foreplain at the foot of a talus slope and the murder that had been reckoned upon took place. - Cormac McCarthy
Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs - Cormac McCarthy
He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man. - Cormac McCarthy