Quotes from Ross MacDonald

We merged our lonelinesses once again, in something less than love but sweeter than self. I didn't get home to West Los Angeles after all.

In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.

She didn't look like any motel manager I had ever seen. More likely an actress who hadn't quite made the grade down south, or a very successful amateur tart on the verge of turning pro. Whatever her business was, there had to be sex in it. She was as full of sex as a grape is full of juice, and so young that it hadn't begun to sour.

My free hand reached for something to hold on to, and closed on liquid nothing.

The apparent facts, if you like. I'm not a philosopher. We lawyers don't deal in ultimate realities. Who knows what they are? We deal in appearances.

It was a Friday night. I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood.

I opened the door of her car and helped her in. Her breast leaned against my shoulder heavily. I moved back. I preferred a less complicated kind of pillow, stuffed with feathers, not memories and frustrations.

A cockroach stepped out from behind the ketchup, gave me a quick impassive once-over, decided that I was of the Brahmin faith, and walked earnestly across the table on errands of his own. Somebody had left a newspaper on the bench beside me, and I picked it up and swatted the cockroach, permitting his soul to transmigrate into the body of a quartermaster.

dozed off with my consciousness slightly ajar.

Freud was one of the greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been trying to turn it back into myth again.

I knew how it was with drunks. They ran out of generosity, even for themselves.

Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms.

a thin woman about fifty with a face like a silver hatchet.

No more guns for you.

She folded her arms across her breasts and looked at me like a lioness.

There's a contradiction in your thinking," I said. "If I took your dirty money, you wouldn't be able to trust my honesty.

He was half a politician, and like most of his kind he was an insecure man.

We're all in the game. We all drive cars, and we're all hooked on oil. The question is how we can get unhooked before we drown in the stuff.

If California is a state of mind, Hollywood is where you take its temperature. There is a peculiar sense in which this city existing mainly on film and tape is our national capital, alas, and not just the capital of California. It's the place where our children learn how and what to dream and where everything happens just before, or just after, it happens to us.

She walked as she owned the world, or had owned it once and lost it but remembered how it felt.

as if by behaving modestly and discreetly they could make the fire stay up on the mountain and die there, like an unwanted god.

What brings you up to the City?" he said when we were inside. To San Franciscans, there's only one city.

I've spilled all my secrets. How do you make people do it?" "I don't. People like to talk about what's hurting them. It takes the edge off the pain sometimes.