"We lived in total poverty. We were bathing in the lake. Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books."

"And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week."

Said Anne DeLisle, the English pop singer who married Cormac McCarthy in 1966 and lived with him for "nearly 8 years in a dairy barn outside Knoxville."

Quoted in "Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89/'All the Pretty Horses,' 'The Road' and 'No Country for Old Men' were among his acclaimed books that explore a bleak world of violence and outsiders" (NYT).