Cormac McCarthy Quotes

American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter (1933–2023)

Cormac McCarthy (born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr.; July 20, 1933 – June 13, 2023) was an American novelist, playwright, short-story writer, and screenwriter. He wrote twelve novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, modernist, and post-apocalyptic fiction genres.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Birth Name: Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr.

Alternative Names: Charles McCarthy • Charles Joseph McCarthy

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—Neither does anybody else. Sometimes you get a clear sense that doing math is largely just feeding data into the substation and waiting to see what comes out. I’m not even sure that it’s all that wise to commit things to memory.

—I’m not sure I see how that would work.

—I’ve no idea. It strikes me as extremely unlikely. But again the probability is not zero.

—I dont believe in this one.

- I dont know what that means. Physics tries to draw a numerical picture of the world. I dont know that it actually explains anything. You cant illustrate the unknown. Whatever that might mean.

How do you know you shouldnt? The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it. How is it that it’s demonstrably better at it than you are? You work on a problem and then you put it away for a while. But it doesnt go away. It reappears at lunch. Or while you’re taking a shower. It says: Take a look at this. What do you think? Then you wonderwhy the shower is cold. Or the soup. Is this doing math? I’m afraid it is. How is it doing it? We dont know. I’ve posed the question to some pretty good

Do you believe in an afterlife?

A group of evil and aberrant and wholly malicious partial differential equations who had conspired to usurp their own reality from the questionable circuitry of the creator’s brain not unlike the rebellion which Milton describes and to fly their colors as an independent nation unaccountable to God or man alike.

I thought about David Bohm. He wrote a really good book on quantum mechanics — largely because Einstein had half convinced him that the theory was faulty. He wanted to get down his thoughts on paper. By the time he'd finished the book he didn't believe in the theory.

As long as you are breathing you can always be more scared.

If the world has a mind then it's all worse than we thought.

Schopenhauer says somewhere that if the entire universe should vanish the only thing left would be music.

My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow.

You shouldn't worry about what people think of you because they don't do it that often.

The days are long but the years are short.