Wealth & Money Quote by Larry McMurtry

McMurtry punctures the American fairy tale with the smallest possible pin: a car that won’t start. It’s funny because it’s petty, and it’s devastating because it’s true. “Great success and huge money” are the language of modern mythmaking, the glossy promise that status isn’t just comfort but exemption. His sentence flips that promise into an “illusion,” insisting that wealth’s real seduction isn’t luxury; it’s the belief in escape from the petty humiliations that level everyone.

The choice of “immunity” is doing heavy work. It borrows medical authority to mock a cultural superstition: that money acts like a vaccine against inconvenience, bad luck, aging, grief, bureaucracy, mechanical failure. McMurtry doesn’t reach for death or heartbreak as his punchline; he goes for the mundane. That’s the subtextual jab. We don’t only fear catastrophe; we fear being stuck, late, helpless, ordinary. A dead engine is a tiny apocalypse of control, a reminder that the world stays stubbornly physical no matter how many zeros are in your bank account.

Context matters with McMurtry: a writer who understood the West not as a heroic stage set but as a workplace of breakdowns, weather, and grit. His novels often demythologize swaggering masculinity and frontier legend. Here, he demythologizes the modern frontier of achievement. The joke lands because it’s not anti-success; it’s anti-delusion, aimed at the spiritual overreach that comes with believing you can buy your way out of being human.