Life & Wisdom Quote by Larry McMurtry

McMurtry drops you into a moral universe where desire is measured not by feeling but by risk tolerance. "A man that ain't willin' to cheat for a poke don't want it bad enough" is crude on purpose: it yanks romance out of candlelight and parks it in the dust, alongside gambling, cattle deals, and lies told with a straight face. The grammar ("ain't", "willi'n") isn’t decorative local color; it’s a credibility cue. This is an ethic delivered from the gut, not the pulpit.

The line’s specific intent is less to endorse infidelity than to diagnose a certain frontier masculinity: wanting is proved through transgression. In McMurtry’s world, yearning competes with scarcity, boredom, and social constraint. Cheating becomes shorthand for any rule-bending that proves you’re serious. The punch is that it reframes betrayal as commitment - a perverse inversion that exposes how men can launder selfishness into bravado. If you won’t risk consequences, you must not be hungry. That’s the logic. It’s also the con.

Subtextually, it’s a critique of the stories men tell themselves. McMurtry, a writer fascinated by the myths of the West and the private humiliations underneath them, often shows how codes of honor get quietly rewritten when appetite shows up. The joke is bitter: the speaker wants to sound like a realist, but he’s really advertising his own emotional illiteracy. Desire becomes something you "take", not something you negotiate. The line works because it’s a clean, brutal little theory of motivation - and because it dares you to notice the rot inside the swagger.