John D. MacDonald Quotes

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.

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

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.

A nonreader is somebody standing there in a blindfold.

If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.

The only thing that prisons demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.

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.

People cannot endure inexplicable worthlessness

...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.

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

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.

In the morning I'm often anti-semantic.

Friendships like marriages are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.

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.

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

Vulnerability is the curse of the thinking classes.

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

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.

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