Best 50 quotes of John D. Macdonald on MyQuotes

All thinking is done with the glands. Logic is added later to tidy things up.

A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

A nonreader is somebody standing there in a blindfold.

As I holed up in the City of Angels, I was also aware of a comforting feeling of anonymity. In the world's biggest third-class city I could pass unnoticed. I spoke the language. I was familiar with the currency. I could drink the water. I could almost breathe the air, late April air, compounded of interesting hydrocarbons.

At times it seems as if arranging to have no commitment of any kind to anyone would be a special freedom. But in fact the whole idea works in reverse. The most deadly commitment of all is to be committed only to one's self. Some come to realize this after they are in the nursing home.

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.

I am not suited to the role of going around selling the life-can-be-beautiful idea. It can be, indeed. But you don't buy the concept from your friendly door-to-door lecture salesman.

If you would be thrilled by watching the galloping advance of a major glacier, you'd be ecstatic watching changes in publishing.

Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will.

Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather.

...it isn't foolish or wicked to enjoy. Wickedness is hurting people on purpose. I love what you are and who you are and how you are. You give me great joy. And you make horrible coffee.

It's no good telling somebody they're trying too hard. It's very much like ordering a child to go stand in a corner for a half hour and never once think about elephants.

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.

New York is where it is going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust population reaches a certain density, they all act like any grasshoppers. When the critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm, and try to eat the world. We're nearing a critical point. One day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. But this time they won't snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each others

Night and gin and music-the right setting for peeling off the thin clinging layers of bullshit and finding one's way down closer to the essential self.

Now each one of us, black or white, is a symbol. The war is out in the open and the skin color is a uniform. All the deep and basic similarities of the human condition are forgotten so that we can exaggerate the few differences that exist.

Now it stands to reason, mister, any damn fool stares into the sun long enough, he'll end up seeing exactly what some other damn fool tells him he's going to see.

Old friend, there are people—young and old—that I like, and people that I do not like. The former are always in short supply. I am turned off by humorless fanaticism, whether it's revolutionary mumbo-jumbo by a young one, or loud lessons from scripture by and old one. We are all comical, touching, slapstick animals, walking on our hind legs, trying to make it a noble journey from womb to tomb, and the people who can't see it all that way bore hell out of me.

People cannot endure inexplicable worthlessness

The dividing line [between friends and acquaintances] is communication, I think. A friend is someone to whom you can say any jackass thing that enters your mind. With acquaintances, you are forever aware of their slightly unreal image of you, and to keep them content, you edit yourself to fit. Many marriages are between acquaintances. You can be with a person for three hours of your life and have a friend. Another will remain an acquaintance for thirty years.

The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.

The only thing that prisons demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.

This was not some pretty little girl, coyly flirtatious, delicately stimulated. This was the mature female of the species, vivid, handsome and strong demanding that all the life within her be matched. Her instinct would detect any hedging, any dishonesty, any less than complete response to her - and then she would be gone for good.

To enjoy enduring success we should travel a little in advance of the world.

[To] me organized religion, the formalities and routines, [is] like being marched in formation to look at a sunset.

Up with life. Stamp out all small and large indignities. Leave everyone alone to make it without pressure. Down with hurting. Lower the standard of living. Do without plastics. Smash the servo-mechanisms. Stop grabbing. Snuff the breeze and hug the kids. Love all love. Hate all hate.

Way over half the murders committed in this country are by close friends or relatives of the deceased. A gun makes a loud and satisfying noise in a moment of passion and requires no agility and very little strength. How many murders wouldn't happen, if they all had to use hammers and knives?

We have been endowed with the capacity and the power to create desirable pictures within and to find them automatically in the outer world of our environment.

When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it makes you take a closer look at your own.

A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else.

Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.

Florida is full of long-range, unending road jobs that break the backs, pocketbooks, and hearts of the roadside business. The primitive, inefficient, childlike Mexicans somehow manage to survey, engineer, and complete eighty miles of high-speed divided highway through raw mountains and across raging torrents in six months. But the big highway contractors in Florida take a year and a half turning fifteen miles of two-lane road across absolutely flat country into four-lane divided highway. The difference is in American know-how. It's know-how in the tax problems, and how to solve them. The State Road Department says a half-year contract will cost the State ten million, and a one-year contract will cost nine, and a year-and-a-half deadline will go for eight. Then Doakes can take on three or four big jobs simultaneously, and lease the equipment from a captive corporation. and listlessly move the equipment from job to job, and spread it out to gain the biggest profit. The only signs of frantic activity can be two or three men with cement brooms who look at first like scarecrows but, when watched carefully, can be perceived to move, much like the minute hand on a clock.

I awakened on Monday with the impression that I might have to get up and bang my head against the wall to get my heart started.

I leaned over and slapped his face sideways and backhanded it back to center position. "Manners," I said.

In all emotional conflicts, the thing you find the most difficult to do, is the thing that you should do." --Meyer's Law

Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards of integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset.

I switched the FM-UHF marine radio to the commercial frequencies and tried to find something that didn't sound like somebody trying to break up a dogfight in a sorority house by banging drums and cymbals. Not that I want to say it isn't music.

I thundered hot water into the big tub, setting up McGee's Handy Home Treatment for Melancholy. A deep hot bath, and a strong cold drink, and a book on the tub rack. Who needs the Megrims? Surely not McGee, not that big brown loose-jointed, wirehaired beach rambler, that lazy fishcatching, girlwatching, grey-eyed iconoclastic hustler. Stay happy, McGee, while you use up the stockpiled cash. Borrow a Junior from Meyer for the sake of coziness. Or get dressed and go over to the next doc, over to the big Wheeler where the Alabama Tiger maintains his permanent floating house party and join the festive pack. Do anything, but stop remembering the way Sam Taggart looks with all the wandering burned out of him. Stop remembering the sly shy way Nicki would walk toward you, across a room. Stop remembering the way Lois died. Get in there and have fun, fella. While there's fun to have. While there's some left. Before they deal you out.

It is one thing to look at a mistreated boat and another to look at a tomb. The silence of the bay seemed more intense. And I could see the glint of the carrion flies.

It's a tricky, complex, indifferent society, Puss. It's a loophole world. And there are a lot of clever animals who know how to reach through the loopholes and pick the pockets of the unsuspecting.

I worry about everything all day long and half the night. I worry about things you never heard of.

[Los Angeles] the world's biggest third-class city...

More fun than a hungover, carbuncled cowboy might have while trying to stay aboard a longhorn, in a dusty rodeo, but it would be a close decision

Please not yet. Those are the three eternal words. Please not yet.

So!" "So?" So I don't think you drove that one off. So it was her choice. So she isn't the kind who says it is for good and then come back all of a sudden. With her, gone is gone. So if I were you, I would be just as bad off as you look. Or worse. So if I were you and one like that was gone for good, I'd miss hell out of her and wonder if maybe I'd handled things a little differently some how, I could have kept her around permanently." "That's enough about 'so.

That's the way They do you. That's the way They set you up for it. There ought to be a warning bell on the happy-meter, so that every time it creeps high enough, you get that dang-dang alert. Duck, boy. That glow makes you too visible. One of Them is out there in the boonies, adjusting the windage, getting you lined up in the cross hairs of the scope.

There is something self-destructive about Western technology and distribution. Whenever any consumer object is so excellent that it attracts a devoted following, some of the slide rule and computer types come in on their twinkle toes and take over the store, and in a trice they figure out just how far they can cut quality and still increase market penetration. Their reasoning is that it is idiotic to make and sell a hundred thousand units of something and make 30 cents a unit when you can increase the advertising, sell five million units, and make a nickel profit a unit. Thus, the very good things of the world go down the drain, from honest turkey to honest eggs to honest tomatoes. And gin.

Vulnerability is the curse of the thinking classes.

When you look at pictures of people you know are dead, there is something different about the eyes. As if they anticipated their particular fate.It is a visceral recognition. I told myself I was getting too fanciful and went to bed.