Top 25 Thomas McGuane Quotes

All the ranchers I know have had back surgery, operations on their rotator cuffs. They all have new knees. I’d like to think I belong to that breed, but I don’t.

Probably, subliminally, I think of the reader as a kind of collaborator. I don’t want to say something for the reader that the reader could have said for himself.

One of the reasons I’m reluctant to start a novel is it’s such an obsessive activity. You get in there, you don’t know anything else while you’re in there. And that’s quite a sacrifice to make, especially for us old guys where time is kind of short. You don’t want to disappear for a year; you want to be outdoors.

Maybe I haven’t been tested, but I have no fear of death at all. I was with Allen Ginsberg during the last year of his life, and he called all his friends and said, ‘I’m on my way out, and it’s kind of exciting.’ I see it as kind of exciting, too.

It took me a long time to know enough about writing to really write short stories. You can’t just immerse yourself, as you do in a novel, and see where everything goes. Novels are a very flexible, accommodating form. Short stories aren’t.

I think anybody alert to the inspiration to write has to be kind of sensitized to the unexpected.

Literature is the ditch I’m going to die in. It’s still the thing I care most about.

I’ve spent as much of my life fishing as decency allowed, and sometimes I don’t let even that get in my way.

I’m a really a fanatical reviser, and there comes a point where I have to declare a truce with the text, or I’ll keep fooling with it forever.

I never wanted to be a celebrity writer. I wanted to be a good writer. I’m still trying to be a good writer. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.

I’m very grateful for what I have. I’m old enough that I can mort out at any minute without any sense of regret at all. That’s not true. I might look back and think I wish I hadn’t been so selfish when my kids were smaller. But I’m not overwhelmed by regret.

I’ve outlived my parents, and I’ve had some wonderful second chances in life. I feel remarkably uncheated.

I am not a team player, including my inadequacies as a parent.

My twenties were entirely taken up with literature. Entirely.

I had a passionate zest for Key West life in all of its little details. I’m not sure why or where that came from, but I was so excited to be there.

I strongly believe that literature can do something that nothing else can do, and that is embody the human spirit.

I think there’s only one interesting story… and that’s struggle.

I liked Hemingway better before I began to be called ‘Hemingwayesque.’

There’s a view of Montana writing that seems stage-managed by the Chamber of Commerce – it’s all about writers like A. B. Guthrie and Ivan Doig. It used to bother me that nobody had a scene where somebody was delivering a pizza.

I’m a great reviser. I do these reckless drafts just to get the lay of the land.

You never see a teaser for a film on television that doesn’t have someone running around a corner with a gun. Have you noticed that?… I think Hollywood has as much responsibility for gun violence as the National Rifle Association.

I’m always surprised to rediscover that there’s something kind of scary about life; and that the feeling we have that we’re in charge is probably ill founded.

I’m a neurotic fiction writer who’d like to be a cowboy.

I think when I first started out, I had a kind of an exuberance about language, comedy, narrative leaps that… stopped just short of non sequiturs. And I’m much more cautious now.

I had a kind of tough early life. I had a tough time in school. I had an unsympathetic family in terms of what I was trying to do. I decided that my family situation was simply hopeless. I kinda bailed out, and my brother and sister didn’t. I failed at marriage, which I’m very upset with myself over.