Quotes on Boooks and Writing

From Larry McMurtry:

"The reader might well ask why this account of the expanding and contracting of my various libraries matters at all.

"I could give several answers to the question but the simplest one is that you write what you've read, to a large degree-- and, just as importantly, you write what you will someday reread. I am now entering the time of rereading and am assembling the hundred books or so that I keep with me tore read as long as I'm here.These are the books that, over about six decades, have meant the most tome; it is because of their combined weight and tone that I have become the kind of writer  I now am."

Except for the number-- I would at a younger 63 find that impossible-- yes.  And the same incidentally for firearms... though well LESS than 100 there!

And from Malcolm Brooks:

""...to poach from J. Frank Dobie,, I guess I try to be an aristocrat in taste, but a democrat in principle... I'm glad I can be moved to tears by Dylan, or Dylan Thomas, or Thomas McGuane, or have my socks knocked off by all manner of things that somehow get into the realm of the ineffable IT. A fluted Clovis point. A Rodin.   A Harley panhead. A girl in a sundress.

"I don't think anyone can achieve perfection, but I pretty much bow to the small number of people in this gloriously messy world who strive to. Somebody asked me not long ago who my heroes were, and I said Teddy Roosevelt and Keith Richards.  From this particular vantage in history, I can't see the contradiction."

Stay tuned...