Quotes from John D. MacDonald

My friend, any way that they can make Americans hate Americans helps the cause. They would like to make Rockwell stronger too. That is the heart of contemporary propaganda, amigo, to strengthen ignorant terrible men who believe themselves to be perfect patriots.

In a little while she got up and went over and closed the door and came back, dropped her halter top and her sun shorts to the floor beside the bed, stood there for not more than two seconds and then stretched out beside me. She bent over the side of the bed and got her cigarettes out of the pocket of the sun shorts, lit two and gave me one and lay back in the circle of my arm, huffed out a big cloud of smoke

We are all at the mercy of the hostility

We are all at the mercy of the hostility of the service industry.

I have busted my gut to learn how to make people open up. Meyer was born with it. A loving empathy shines out of those little bright-blue eyes. Strangers tell him things they wouldn't tell their husband or their priest.

In my experience, John D. MacDonald, the man, was as kind and thoughtful as his fiction would lead you to believe that he must be. That a writer's work accurately reflects his soul is a rarer thing than you might imagine, but in his case, the reflection is clear and true. For that reason, it has been a special honor, in fact a grace, to be asked to write this introduction.

Somebody has to be tireless, my boy, or the fast buck operators would asphalt the entire coast, fill every bay and slay every living thing incapable of carrying a wallet. And with my left hand I strike the occasional blow of culture.

boy. I have a shallow, pyrotechnic, unchanging brilliance with which I awe the peasants, but there is no solidity, no basic texture, hence no capacity for creative growth.

It happens to people. They get to the point of explaining the mission and can't make it, so they go into a talking jag. She needed help. There was a thin edge of anxiety in her tone, and the words came too fast. So I gave her some help. What have you got in the box? I asked.

we both knew we were talking nonsense. The habit of involvement is not easily broken. It is even more pervasive than the habit of noninvolvement, the habit of walking away when the action starts.

He guessed he had better face up to it and admit, watching the shabby rowboat approach the bank, that she was just too darn close to that picture he had been carting around in his head, of a girl he had never met, of a girl made up of bits and pieces of other girls known wisely and not too well.

Many marriages are between acquaintances. You can be with a person for three hours of your life and have a friend. Another one will remain an acquaintance for thirty years.

A gaggle of giggles?" Meyer said, trying that one on me. My turn. "How about a prance of pussycats?" "Not bad at all. Hmmm. A scramble of scrumptious?

If you keep things in the front of your mind, you worry at them like a hound chomping a dead rabbit.

There are a lot of them running loose these days, I thought, fattening themselves on the sick business of whipping up such fear and confusion that they turn decent men against their decent neighbors in this sad game of think-alike.

That is the heart of contemporary propaganda, amigo, to strengthen ignorant terrible men who believe themselves to be perfect patriots.

The rain comes down, baby, and we've all got sixteen buckets and seventeen holes in the roof.

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.

under it, when you come back, you can sense another more significant and more enduring vitality. It has been somewhat hammered down of late. The bell ringers and flag fondlers have been busily peddling their notion that to make America Strong, we must march in close and obedient ranks, to the sound of their little tin whistle. The life-adjustment educators, in strange alliance with the hucksters of consumer

When I play with my cat, who knows but that she regards me more as a plaything than I do her? —MICHEL EYQUEM DE MONTAIGNE

The three unholy McGees—the one I try not to be, and the one I wish I was, and the one I really am.

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

am talking about this insane preoccupation with throwing balls of various shapes and sizes back and forth.

The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhausting quantity, but there is a curious tastelessness about them. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else.