McCarthy's pages look bare on purpose. No quotation marks around dialogue, almost no semicolons, hardly a stray mark anywhere. He treated punctuation as clutter and cut nearly all of it.

The Direct Answer
He kept punctuation to a bare minimum so nothing would clutter the prose.
He used no quotation marks and almost no semicolons, telling Oprah Winfrey in 2007 that he believed in 'periods, capitals and the occasional comma.'

No Quotation Marks, Almost No Semicolons

Open any McCarthy novel and the dialogue runs without quotation marks. He argued that if you write a scene clearly enough, the reader always knows who's speaking, so the little marks become dead weight. The catch is that it forces the writer to earn that clarity. You have to build the rhythm and the attribution into the sentences themselves. He'll often drop even the 'he said,' letting a line break or a shift in cadence signal a new voice.

Semicolons got the same treatment. He rarely used one and saw no need for it. He'd allow a colon before a list, a comma now and then, a period to stop a thought cold. He traced the habit back to reading Neoclassical prose and quietly stripping the semicolons out of writers like Swift, trying to make the sentences easier to read rather than harder.

By the time he wrote The Road, he'd pushed the habit further, dropping the apostrophes from contractions like 'dont' and 'wont' and 'cant,' while keeping them where their absence would trip a reader up. The stripped spelling matched the stripped world of the book. Nothing on the page you didn't need, nothing standing between the reader and the sentence.

He credited James Joyce as the model. Joyce kept punctuation to a minimum, and McCarthy followed him, convinced that clean text served the reader better than a page speckled with marks. He wasn't chasing difficulty. He thought a properly written sentence carried its own signals, and the marks were mostly there to prop up prose that hadn't done the job on its own.

James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There's no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks.

Cormac McCarthy, in his 2007 interview with Oprah Winfrey

Clarity Was Always the Point

McCarthy's minimalism wasn't a pose. Every choice bent toward making the prose easy to move through at speed. He wanted the marks that carried meaning and none of the ones that only decorated. It's the same instinct that kept his sentences plain in their bones even when the subject turned biblical or brutal.

He gave the same advice to scientists. For years he edited papers for researchers at the Santa Fe Institute, and his guidance, later written up in the journal Nature, came down to the same idea: minimize the punctuation and strip out anything decorative that slows a reader down. Whether the page held a gunfight or a proof, the rule held.

For the full picture of how this fit his working life, see the full Cormac McCarthy writing routine.

What He Wrote to Two High School Students

McCarthy almost never explained himself. One of the clearest statements he left came in 2014, when two high school students, Lily Wilhelm and Carly Oseran, emailed him questions about his style. He wrote back, and Literary Hub later published the exchange. Asked about the missing quotation marks, he gave the plainest version of his reasoning on record:

In an older time, writers filled pages with quotation marks, commas, semi colons, etc. supposedly to help the reader. But there comes a point where, in my opinion, they just mess up the page. I use as few diacritical marks as I can get by with.

Cormac McCarthy, in a 2014 reply to two high school students, published by Literary Hub

The word doing the work there is supposedly. In his view most of those marks were a crutch, a way for a writer to skip the harder job of making a sentence clear on its own. Take the crutch away and the sentence has to stand up by itself.

How the Dialogue Stays Readable

Readers who pick up The Road or No Country for Old Men for the first time often expect to get lost in the conversations. Mostly they don't, and it's worth looking at why, because the method is learnable.

The paragraph break does the job the quotation marks usually do. A new speaker gets a new line, every time, so the white space on the page tells you the voice has changed before you've read a word of it. He leans on that break harder than most writers would dare.

He also tags sparingly but not never. A long run of short exchanges between two people can go untagged for a stretch, and then a plain he said lands to re-anchor you before you drift. The verb stays plain. You won't find characters exclaiming or retorting.

The rest is voice. His people talk so differently from each other, in rhythm and in what they refuse to say, that you can often tell who's speaking from the line alone. That's the real requirement hiding under the style. If two of your characters sound alike, dropping the quotation marks will expose it immediately, and if they don't, the marks were never doing much.

If you want to try it in your own draft, pick a scene with only two speakers and a clear tension between them. Strip the quotation marks, keep a tag every four or five lines, and read it aloud. Anywhere you lose track of who's talking is a place where the voices aren't distinct yet. Fix the voice before you touch the punctuation. For the wider craft, see how to write dialogue that feels real.

Reading how Cormac McCarthy worked is the easy part. The Writer's Daily Practice gives you a page for every morning of the year, and each one ends with a prompt to get you writing.

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