Larry McMurtry Quotes

I think it's true about people now being closer to their parents, since the '60s, really. The parents are no longer from a different planet, the 1950s ideas of American family. We could be friends with our parents. After the '60s, it wasn't like a person smoking pot was what the parents would be appalled at.

One of the problems of our youth is that the family unit is broken up. When we'd sit down to dinner together as a family, we'd learn about each other. We had something people don't get today.

The concept of the strong linkage to the family is breaking down in Western nations.

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.

The erosion of extended family concept and losing out on values are the two things that are primarily responsible for the growing mismatch in the parent-child relationship.

When I began to think about the head of the family, the storyteller, the rise of television which became the new storyteller, the break-up of the American family as an idea and then Avalon came.

It was a very bold step for Sports Illustrated, and a lot of people are taking notice. I want it to be so normal that people don't even notice anymore.

Without collective awakening the catastrophe will come. I think people in the mass media, journalists, film makers and others, you can contribute to the collective awakening if you are awake and then your life will embody that awakening.

What interested me most about the Kennedys was the family situation. Somehow, they had created this family that lasted over time, they had a sense of connection to one another. Especially now, when people are spread all over the country and they don't see grandparents and parents, this family bonded together.

Families have always been in flux and often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about "the way things used tobe." But that doesn't mean the malaise and anxiety people feel about modern families are delusions, that everything would be fine if we would only realize that the past was not all it's cracked up to be. . . . Even if things were not always right in families of the past, it seems clear that some things have newly gone wrong.

I suppose I'm qualified to some degree to speak about the nature of contemporary media, as that's where I currently work. People, I think have been beyond trained - coded to not anticipate change; to think that change is implausible. Almost weaned off. It had to be a revolution bred out of us.

I have always loved telling stories about families. I love the idea of people who may not choose to be together, but are nonetheless bonded for life and forced to interact and develop these relationships. I love the tension throwing different types of people under one roof creates.

Although I really like the people I travel with, family is just different, and having them around at all times is a really nice thing - and a luxury.

We need to take on the new media, and in terms of power and public pedagogy, we need to organize a whole range of people outside of the academy.

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

This is the kind of upbringing we had instead of sitting in front of a damn television set all day long and never answering to anybody else unless somebody spoke up from a television set. It's an altogether different way of living today that you wonder how it really affects the family? I know how it affects the family because I have my own son who has his children and also my daughter. It's one of those things. Everybody eats in their own way and off they go. You know? It's not family oriented anymore."

It is obvious to any observer that in every western country the increase of importance of public schools has been at least coincident with the relaxation of older family ties.

The media can be an instrument of change. It can maintain the status quo and reflect the views of the society or it can, hopefully, awaken people and change minds. I think it depends on who’s piloting the plane.

Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois , meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life.

In the East, as in the West, newspapers are fast becoming people's Bible, Koran, Zend-Avesta and Gita all rolled into one.

Freedom in every sense but primarily political sense, a rise in repression that stems from a repression of sexuality. It's AIDS, it's herpes, it's this, it's that. Ask any saloon owner what's happened to social life in America in the past 12 years and they'll tell you it's a different world and these people are strongly misinformed by the media, peer pressure.

People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media.

It is terrifying to people when women step up and start owning the story that they have not owned. And I'm seeing so much of this, and it is a seismic shift.

If you want to change a whole people, then you start with the girls. It stands to reason: they learn faster, and they pass on what they learn to their children.

Television is a great leveler. You always end up sounding like the people who ask the questions.