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., Nov. 20, 2009]

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.

You are either born a writer or you are not.

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.

The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

What could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream

There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.

Then don't. I can't help you. They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don't dream at all. You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so don't ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you'll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you won't survive for yourself. I know because I would have never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and sheild it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.

I have no enemies. I dont permit such a thing.

He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.

There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.

But what is your life? Can you see it? It vanishes at its own appearance. Moment by moment. Until it vanishes to appear no more. When you look at the world is there a point in time when the seen becomes the remembered? How are they separate? It is that which we have no way o show. It is that which is missing from our map and from the picture that it makes. And yet is all we have.

If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke.

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.You forget some things, dont you?Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

In the grueling light that passed for day...

There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

in that cold autistic dark.