Thomas McGuane
Thomas Francis McGuane III is an American writer. His work includes ten novels, short fiction and screenplays, as well as three collections of essays devoted to his life in the outdoors. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Cutting Horse Association Members Hall of Fame and the Fly-Fishing Hall of Fame.
McGuane's early novels were noted for a comic appreciation for the irrational core of many human endeavors, multiple takes on the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. His later writing reflected an increasing devotion to family relationships and relationships with the natural world in the changing American West, primarily Montana, where he has made his home since 1968, and where his last five novels and many of his essays are set. He has three children, Annie, Maggie and Thomas.
“After the long time of going together and the mutual trust that had grown out of that time, Payne had occasion to realize that no mutual trust had grown out of the long time they had gone together.”
“The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul, is that at some point you buy a ticket too.”
“We both liked children; we just didn't want any ourselves. There were children everywhere, and we saw no reason to start our own brand. Young couples plunge into parenthood and about half the time they end up with some ghastly problem on their hands. We thought we'd leave that to others.”
“They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics.”
“She ate her breakfast in silence, then drove downtown in weather so lowering the streetlights seemed decapitated. This was when you could discover if your preparations for winter were adequate, and if you were ready for the restrictions of movement and light that were about to be upon you.”
“Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana.”
“Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.”
“In Oakland, he saw two slum children sword fighting on a slag heap. In Palo Alto, a puffy fop in bursting jodhpurs shouted from the door of a luxurious stable, "My horse is soiled!" While one chilly evening in Union Square he listened to a wild-eyed young woman declaim that she had seen delicate grandmothers raped by Kiwanis zombies, that she had seen Rotarian blackguards bludgeoning Easter bunnies in a coal cellar, that she had seen Irving Berlin buying an Orange Julius in Queens.”
“By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.”
“That food was so bad I can't wait for it to become a turd and leave me.”
“It don't do you no nevermind to tell nobody nothing.”
“I may be the wrong person for my life.”
“I considered the wonder of the things that befell me, convinced that my life was the best omelet you could make with a chainsaw. -- Panama”