You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didn’t. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn’t know you could steal your own life. And I didn’t know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I think I done the best with it I knew how but it still wasn’t mine. It never has been.

He won the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road (2006). In a 2006 poll of authors and publiCormac McCarthyrs conducted by The New York Times Magazine to list the greatest American novels of the previous quarter-century Blood Meridian placed third behind only Toni Morrison's Beloved and Don DeLillo's Underworld. The book has grown appreciably in stature in literary circles.

Blood Meridian (1985) was among Time magazine's list of 100 best English-language books publiCormac McCarthyd between 1923 and 2005 and placed joint runner-up in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction publiCormac McCarthyd in the last 25 years. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time alongside Don DeLillo Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth and called Blood Meridian "the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying". All the Pretty Horses and The Road were also adapted as motion pictures.