Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthyis an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road. His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. For All the Pretty Horses, he won both the U.S. National Book Award and National Book...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 July 1933
CityProvidence, RI
CountryUnited States of America
If you could breathe a breath so strong you could blow out the wolf. Like you blow out the copo. Like you blow out the fire from the candela. The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only.
It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable.
The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.
People think they know what they want but they generally don't. Sometimes if they're lucky they'll get it anyways.
Fear of an enemy can often blind men to other hazards, not least the shape which they themselves make in the world.
Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in the maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life.
Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them.
You go back home and everything you wished was different is still the same and everything you wished was the same is different.
The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it.
I guess you ought to be careful about cussin the dead. I would say at the least there probably ain't no luck in it.
The voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such things as lives in silence themselves.
Even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering.
I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere.
Last words are only words.