once ready to write
words flowed hands thinking, not a …
conscious process
“When you write something down you pretty well kill it,” he said. “Leave it loose and knocking around up there and you never know — it might turn into something.”
Once he was ready to write, he said, the words flowed.
“My hands do the thinking,” he said. “It is not a conscious process”
From Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered by Elizabeth A. Harris.
Elizabeth A. Harris writes about books and publishing for The Times.
Cormac McCarthy, the formidable and reclusive writer of Appalachia and the American Southwest, whose raggedly ornate early novels about misfits and grotesques gave way to the lush taciturnity of “All the Pretty Horses” and the apocalyptic minimalism of “The Road,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89.
No Haiku For You 