Zitat des Tages von Thomas McGuane:
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.
My friends seem to think that an hour and a half effort a day is all they need to bring to the altar to make things work for them. I couldn't do that. I thought that if you didn't work at least as hard as the guy who runs a gas station, then you had no right to hope for achievement. You certainly had to work all day, every day.
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 think anybody alert to the inspiration to write has to be kind of sensitized to the unexpected.
Not long ago, in response to a spell of insomnia, I learned some of the principles of meditation, to empty my mind piece by piece. It was like the old game of jacks - cautiously lifting each jack clear of its neighbor until only the empty background remained.
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.
I wrote a lot of 'Driving on the Rim' by giving myself the gift of being just as eccentric as I felt like.
I'm not considered as illegitimate as I once was. Because in a sense, I'm like lip cancer - I'm not going to go away.
I am not a team player, including my inadequacies as a parent.
I really do love 'Panama.' But I'd also have to admit that right now, if I were driven to write another novel like that, I wouldn't even try to find a publisher for it. It simply wouldn't be published. I'd be writing it to put in my closet upstairs.
Marriage is anti-romantic - husband and wife are terms like 'turkey' and 'goose.' Worse, they denote ownership.
I'm a neurotic fiction writer who'd like to be a cowboy.
I find it more consoling to think of myself as little than to think of myself as big. I think I've gotten that from animals, particularly dogs. Dogs live such a modest life, and they don't live long, and the more you're around them, you kind of accept that.
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'm certainly afraid of not being able to write for some reason. I guess I've had spells of not necessarily writer's block, but something like that. I find that pretty terrifying.
I'm a great reviser. I do these reckless drafts just to get the lay of the land.
A lot of the writers I've known for 20 years, who used to say, 'Maybe they're right - the novel is dead!' - well, now they don't feel that it's necessarily the biggest job or most sacred calling on the planet. But it's definitely a real thing - it's always been here, always will be here, and one might just as well buckle down and get to work.
Summertime in Montana, I become a monosyllabic baboon. I want to ride with the cowboys, go to brandings, doctor cattle, and train my horses. But in a few months, the snow starts to fly. The days become shorter; the yellow color of interior light becomes delicious. I look at my shelves, and every book just glows, and I want to be inside of that.
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 strongly believe that literature can do something that nothing else can do, and that is embody the human spirit.
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.