Top 100 John D Macdonald Quotes
#1. I still think that of all the people doing top fiction today, John D. MacDonald is the best.He was my model as a kid. If there are people out there that want to write, all you need to do is read 20 of his stories to get an idea what it takes to make a story kick over.
Stephen King
#2. John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?
Kingsley Amis
#3. I was raised on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Something about this genre - hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold - never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator.
Alan Furst
#4. The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.
John D. MacDonald
#5. The wide world is full of likable people who get kicked in the stomach regularly.
John D. MacDonald
#6. After I had chased the ghastliness of Fancha out of my mind, I settled down to some planning. A trip out to Leavenworth had a deceptive plausibility.
John D. MacDonald
#7. For perhaps the first time in my life I appreciated the corrosive effects of total uncertainty.
John D. MacDonald
#8. Cathy introduced us. Christine stood there inside her smooth skin, warm and indolent, mildly speculative.
John D. MacDonald
#9. O thank you, Uncle Omar. Thank you for instilling a helpless youth with such grave suspicions of women and all their works, that here and now, in my maturity, in my thirty-second year, I cannot confront a lovely and half-naked lady without getting cramps in my toes and saying gahr.
John D. MacDonald
#10. I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess that we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.
John D. MacDonald
#11. It would be one kind of penance. And there are never enough kinds. Not for him. Not for me. And certainly not for you, my friend.
John D. MacDonald
#12. Please not yet. Those are the three eternal words. Please not yet.
John D. MacDonald
#13. 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?
John D. MacDonald
#14. Walk very lightly and carefully, Wade. Look behind every bush.
John D. MacDonald
#17. Her dark eyes were like twin entrances to two deep caves. Nothing lived in those caves. Maybe something had, once upon a time. There were piles of picked bones back in there, some scribbling on the walls, and some grey ash where the fires had been.
John D. MacDonald
#18. You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.
John D. MacDonald
#19. In all emotional conflicts, the thing you find the most difficult to do, is the thing that you should do.
Meyer's Law
John D. MacDonald
#20. A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.
John D. MacDonald
#21. You feel that a door will open and you will be summoned, and horrid things will happen to you before they let you go. You can not mark these houses with any homely flavor of living. When they are emptied after occupancy, they have the look of places where the blood has recently been washed away.
John D. MacDonald
#22. In spite of the air conditioning, she had filled the lounge with a faint sharp-sweet odor of large overheated girl.
John D. MacDonald
#23. 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.
John D. MacDonald
#24. Willy Lazeer is an acquaintance. His teeth and his feet hurt. He hates the climate, the Power Squadron, the government and his wife. The vast load of hate has left him numbed rather than bitter. In appearance, it is as though somebody bleached Sinatra, skinned him, and made Willy wear him.
John D. MacDonald
#25. There are people who try to look as if they are doing a good and thorough job, and then there are the people who actually damn well do it, for its own sake.
John D. MacDonald
#26. Somebody has to be tireless or the fast buck operators would asphalt the entire coast, fill every bay and slay every living thing incapable of carrying a wallet.
John D. MacDonald
#27. If there's no pain and no loss, it's only recreational and we can leave it to the minks. People have to be valued.
John D. MacDonald
#29. I heard his hasty footsteps on the dock. I kept my head down. I heard the thump and felt it as he leaped down into the cockpit. I heard his grunt of consternation. He would have to find out, and find out quickly.
John D. MacDonald
#30. Saturday night. Buddy Dow, hired skipper of a big lunker owned by an insurance company in Atlanta, had enlisted two recruits and was despairingly in need of more.
John D. MacDonald
#32. In the sense of movement a boat is a living thing.
It is a companion in the night. Each boat has its own manner and character.
Travis McGee, 1985
John D. MacDonald
#34. Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.
John D. MacDonald
#35. Sister, I do what I do, and I do it better than most, and I take some satisfaction in that. I am like a very dependable dog. They throw a stick into a jungle and I can go in there and bring it back.
John D. MacDonald
#36. The bathroom was humid with steam and soap. The elderly Palm Beach sybarite who had ordered the pleasure barge for his declining years had added many nice touches.
John D. MacDonald
#37. 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.
John D. MacDonald
#38. If you look over in that direction, like two hundred yards, you will see some birds walking. Never drive the boat toward where the birds are walking. First rule of navigation.
John D. MacDonald
#39. 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.
John D. MacDonald
#41. The early bird who gets the worm works for somebody who comes in late and owns the worm farm.
John D. MacDonald
#42. 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.
John D. MacDonald
#43. Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefor. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man's reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why?
John D. MacDonald
#47. 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.
John D. MacDonald
#48. 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.
John D. MacDonald
#49. Never leave anything which can be traced, when you do have a choice.
John D. MacDonald
#50. He tottered in. In a few moments he came out, hair piece in place. But the haggardness of his face made it look more spurious than before.
John D. MacDonald
#51. Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.
John D. MacDonald
#52. We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.
John D. MacDonald
#53. Are too many mouths to feed. One million three hundred thousand more every week! And of all the people who have ever been alive on Earth, more than half are living right now. We are gnawing the planet bare,
John D. MacDonald
#54. I just don't know. Maybe I'm good, but that goddamn scale would hesitate a long time before tilting that way.
John D. MacDonald
#55. Would you rather I found you a place of your own right away?" "It doesn't matter." "Which would you rather do?" The effort of decision brought her out of her torpor. She made fists and her lips tightened. "I guess I have to be with you.
John D. MacDonald
#57. every day, not matter how you fight it, you learn a little more about yourself, and all most of it does is teach humility.
John D. MacDonald
#58. My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.
John D. MacDonald
#60. And you can sit out here in the hour before dawn, boy, and think virtuous thoughts and tell yourself how noble you are and all that shit, and you are going to lay back and hang on to the money, because that is the way the world keeps score. Not your way. Not lately.
John D. MacDonald
#61. Settled for a blooming redhead from Waco, Takes-us, name of Molly Bea Archer, carefully cut her out of the pack and trundled her, tipsy and willing, back to the Busted Flush.
John D. MacDonald
#62. The world is full of damp rocks, with some very strange creatures hiding under them.
John D. MacDonald
#63. His wife, Gerry, was a truly stunning blonde in her middle twenties, tall and gracious, but with eyes just a little cold to match a smile so warm and welcoming.
John D. MacDonald
#64. 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.
John D. MacDonald
#66. If there was one sunset every twenty years, how would people react to them? If there were ten seashells in all the world, what would they be worth? If people could make love just once a year, how carefully would they pick their mates?
John D. MacDonald
#67. But now Cathy had created the restlessness, the indignation, the beginnings of that shameful need to clamber aboard my spavined white steed, knock the rust off the armor, tilt the crooked old lance and shout huzzah. Sleep immediately followed decision.
John D. MacDonald
#68. 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.
John D. MacDonald
#69. 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.
John D. MacDonald
#70. He chuckled and pulled himself to his feet. "End of session, McGee. Good night and good luck." At the door he turned and said, "I'll have you checked out, of course. Just for the hell of it. I'm a careful and inquisitive man.
John D. MacDonald
#73. I went into the lunchroom. A stocky young girl in a soiled green jumper sat at a table reading a fan magazine. She got up slowly when the screen door creaked. She had enormous breasts and she looked like Buddy Hackett.
John D. MacDonald
#74. It was to have been a quiet evening at home. Home is the Busted Flush, 52-foot barge-type houseboat, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale.
John D. MacDonald
#76. 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.
John D. MacDonald
#77. [To] me organized religion, the formalities and routines, [is] like being marched in formation to look at a sunset.
John D. MacDonald
#79. You know what just seeing him did to me." "I know. Lois, he just isn't that ominous. Evil, but not ominous. Sly, but not prescient. Once he is off balance, he will stay off balance, and fall heavily. And the law will gather him in.
John D. MacDonald
#80. It is a practical world, Mr. Owen, and we have to do practical things.
John D. MacDonald
#81. All thinking is done with the glands. Logic is added later to tidy things up.
John D. MacDonald
#82. Waves can wash away the most stubborn stains, and the stars do not care one way or the other.
John D. MacDonald
#83. That is the flaw in my personality. Vanity. And your flaw is sentimentality. They are the flaws which will inevitably kill us both.
John D. MacDonald
#84. When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it makes you take a closer look at your own.
John D. MacDonald
#85. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else.
John D. MacDonald
#86. Victims, he thought, were birds and animals and people who arrived at the wrong place at the wrong time, usually in too big a hurry.
John D. MacDonald
#89. Hascomb snatched an ancient weapon out of his glove compartment. Officers have smuggled them home from the last five wars. The Colt.45 automatic.
John D. MacDonald
#91. 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.
John D. MacDonald
#92. Keep your head down, fella. Do your job. Sell the product, write the contracts, negotiate the loans, attend the closings, bank your share and fatten the Keogh accordingly.
John D. MacDonald
#93. If you would be thrilled by watching the galloping advance of a major glacier, you'd be ecstatic watching changes in publishing.
John D. MacDonald
#94. It can happen to anybody, getting all hung up on some twenty-year-old quiff. Like the little dog in the freight yard, and the train nips off the end of his tail and he yelps and spins around and it cuts off his head. Never lose your head over a piece of tail.
John D. MacDonald
#95. I could have listed maybe fifty possible reactions without coming close to the one I got. Her eyes dulled and her narrow nostrils flared wide and her mouth fell into sickness. She lost her posture and stood in an ugly way.
John D. MacDonald
#96. He was in a gigantic circular bed, with a pink canopy over it. In all the luxuriant femininity of that big bedroom, George looked shrunken and misplaced, like a dead worm in a birthday cake.
John D. MacDonald
#97. the glue that seems to hold mankind in some kind of lasting stasis is everyone's desire to be useful.
John D. MacDonald
#98. And would not her fastidious litheness take away the heavy taste of the fleshy girls in the Citrus Inn? McGee, the Perfidious.
John D. MacDonald
#99. All the little gods of irony must whoop and weep and roll on the floors of Olympus when they tune in on the night thoughts of a truly fatuous male.
John D. MacDonald
#100. Nothing goes on forever. And if you stay patient, problems tend to go away in time.
John D. MacDonald
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