Quotes by Cormac McCarthy

“The freedom of birds is an insult to me.”

“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.”

“You are either born a writer or you are not.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all...”

“In my father's last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find ...”

“There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.”

“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.”

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

“Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. Aft...”

“I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other b...”

“I just meant maybe you could set here and drink one of em with me.He squinted at her. You ever notice how women have trouble takin no for a answer? I think itstarts about age three.What about men?T...”

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”

“A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Wil or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reck...”

“No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they?No. It's never like what you expected.Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?”

“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.”

“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 prove...”

“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the worlds heart beat at some terrible cost and that the worlds pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of divergin...”

“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.”