Tracy Daugherty > Quotes

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,”
― Tracy Daugherty, The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion

“Male novelists were granted a 'social tradition' in which to operate, Didion discovered" 'hard drinkers, bad livers, wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts.”
― Tracy Daugherty

“In London, they visited Cecil Court, a renowned booksellers’ street, but were disappointed by the fare. In Cheltenham, they bought forty-five books by Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“McMurtry had long been fascinated by the fact that American westerns had always been popular in Europe—maybe more so than in the United States. (Rudolf Muus, a Norwegian, wrote over five hundred westerns, bested by the Frenchman George Fronval, weighing in with more than six hundred tales. By contrast, Zane Grey managed only seventy-eight.)”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“None of it [art] tells you anything new; it merely reminds you of something you already know but forgot you knew. And that's what Larry did." [Bill Wittliff about Larry McMurtry]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“And at the end of the day, his fellow scribbler Nelson Algren would neatly encapsulate nomadic wisdom: “Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never play cards with a man named Doc, and never sleep with a woman whose problems are worse than your own.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“I’m in no way envious of Paris in the twenties because we had Palo Alto in the sixties.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“Larry didn’t go to the big cattle drive in the sky. He’s prowling for rare books at the big garage and estate sales in the sky,” Leslie Silko said.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“he finally acceded to the need, long urged on him by Khristal Collins, to sell books on the internet. To his surprise, China proved a quick and steady customer. “We had a lot of good porcelain books. Sold every one of them to China,” he marveled. “I mean, these were thousand-dollar books. They’re not cheap. I guess they are really serious about porcelain in China.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“I loved idiot paintings, tops of doors, decors, saltimbanques, canvases, signboards, popular engravings, obsolete literature, church Latin, badly-spelled pornographic works, novels by our grandmothers, fairy tales, little children’s books, old operas, folk refrains, popular rhythms. —Rimbaud, “A Season in Hell”
― Tracy Daugherty, Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme

“But I had ceased to be that person; I acted him or impersonated him as best I could, for the benefit of loved ones." [Larry McMurtry]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“But when had America ever been reasonable about guns? “More people died outside that Safeway on a Saturday morning … right up the road from where I write … than died in the famous and endlessly re-enacted shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, also not very far down the road,” he wrote.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“The bookshops are a form of ranching,” he said. “Instead of herding cattle, [booksellers] herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraphlike clusters.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“I’ve seen cowboying die, and also bookselling, to a large degree. And both those things sadden me.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“McMurtry credited him with writing one of the finest sentences ever scribbled by a Texan, a warning about the challenge of surviving in the Lone Star State: “Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“Not long after I entered the pastures of the empty page I realized that the place where all my stories start is the heart faced suddenly with the loss of its country, its customary and legendary range.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“our emotional experience remains largely unexplored, and therein lie the dramas, poems, and novels." [Larry McMurtry]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“(“One reason I’m comfortable in dusty bookshops is that I have no sartorial interests,” McMurtry said.)”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“[I]t is a charming thing to watch,” when “moviemakers have ‘ideas,’” McMurtry said. “The delight these ‘ideas’ occasion, when they finally appear, approximates what an ardent 89-year-old lover might feel upon discovering that he has an erection. Unfortunately, the promise of these ‘ideas’ (like that of not a few erections) is something that is often appreciated only by the possessor.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“It appalled her that the culture birds in Washington and New York did not seem to know whom they had in their midst. “People do not always recognize … the intellectual heft of Larry,” she said. “People don’t put him in the same category as a New Yorker essayist. But he is.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“The sixties circus was about to hit town, horns ablare, heralded by the publications of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Horseman, Pass By, Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“Benjamin Moser called his books “masterpieces. His characters were so vivid, his plots so intriguing, his language both so natural and so refined, that I came to regard him, book by book, with something approaching awe … I’m not a crier, and those books made me cry.” Before he died, Bill Wittliff said, “Larry took us out of our literary adolescence to a beginning maturity.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“A heavily tattooed woman from Tyler, Texas, convinced that, in the future, books would simply be novelty items, bought a stack to sell in a booth she owned in a Dallas marketplace. She traded in oddities such as “tattooed furniture and skateboard decks.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“Working on novels, he reaffirmed his belief that nothing important could really be explained; it could only be experienced in the daily clutter of stuff that fiction was so good at cataloguing. [re: Larry McMurtry]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“Trying to make small talk with customers, he’d say things like, “I had an expensive education, but I learned most of what I know in secondhand bookshops.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“[Sadly,] in Washington we don’t go in for elusive statements. We are not particularly well-read and therefore even the deft allusions are lost.” McMurtry would have put it another way: “The higher a monkey climbs, the more it shows its ass.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“Residents raised fattened pigs, setting them free at night to clean the streets.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“As he leaves, he will hear “the music of departure,” as McMurtry wrote elsewhere, discussing his own farewell to early youth, the sound of a “god almost out of hearing.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“[W]hat an artist does is fail,” he writes. “The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition . . . there is no such thing as a ‘successful artist.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme

“Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult,” he said, “but because it wishes to be art.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme