"Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing."
-Author Cormac McCarthy (The Road, All The Pretty Horses, et al) from an absolutely fantastic interview that appears in today's Wall Street Journal. Go read it.
Friday, November 13, 2009
10
I prefer to do things that drive me (almost) to cannibalism. Just like that handsome Aragorn guy.
Blood Meridian is the best novel ever.
Marriage is a wonderful institution.
I wish he were my uncle I could drink with at Thanksgiving.
AGREED.
the day in mottos! first cormac, Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing." and then, kate moss, "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels." it's like, how can one choose
in college, i devoured his novels. then i became a parent. then i read the road.
too much. too hard. i won't read it again.
I'm like you. It hurts to think about that book. I can't decide whether I think it's a great book or a great crime committed against me personally.
i bet if feels insane to be his son. why bother being loved by anyone else?
Another great lost Cormac McCarthy motto got sliced and diced beyond quotation by the damned NY Times Book Review in 1992, when McCarthy said writers like Proust and James (that's kind of a broad use of the word "like," but okay) aren't real literature because they "[don't] deal with issues of life and death." That's as much of the sentence as appears within quotation marks (he did get to go on: "I don't understand them. To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."), but it sure poisoned my well. I read that and went and read The Golden Bowl and couldn't help but think, These pissants and their petty pissant problems and all the idle ingenuity and energies they get to devote to them: You are so right, old man.