Thomas McGuane

I'm always surprised to rediscover that there's something kind of scary about life; and that the feeling we have that we're in charge is probably ill founded.

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've spent as much of my life fishing as decency allowed, and sometimes I don't let even that get in my way.

I had a passionate zest for Key West life in all of its little details. I'm not sure why or where that came from, but I was so excited to be there.

I've outlived my parents, and I've had some wonderful second chances in life. I feel remarkably uncheated.

If I get too old to write, or short-term memory loss - that was the one Philip Roth was worried about - if I got to that point, that would be terrible, because everything about my life has been streaming toward writing and having something to say. That would make me feel as though I were in an iron maiden of some kind.

You reach a point at which you have to view your life through the things you've spent so much time doing. The alternative is a perilous feeling of waste.

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.

People don't understand how much influence they can actually have on a writer, how much a writer's feelings can be hurt, how much they can deflect his course when they raise their voices like they did over highly personal books like 'Panama' or 'Bullet Park.'

My parents and my sister died... very close together, and after that, I lost quite a bit of my sense of humor. Most of it I think has kind of come back, but I know there was a time when I didn't think things were funny anymore. I kind of think they're funny again.

I think when I first started out, I had a kind of an exuberance about language, comedy, narrative leaps that... stopped just short of non sequiturs. And I'm much more cautious now.

One of the illusions that we live by is that we can really know anybody else, and we're often surprised by traits in people that we thought we knew very well. The struggle to overcome loneliness, which is sort of our universal burden, leads us to leap to conclusions about who other people are.