By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.

— Cormac McCarthy

By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.

— Cormac McCarthy

Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.

— Cormac McCarthy

Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock?

— Cormac McCarthy

Carry the fire.

— 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]

— 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 they

— Cormac McCarthy

Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.

— Cormac McCarthy

Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them.

— Cormac McCarthy

Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone. She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said.

— Cormac McCarthy