John D. MacDonald Quotes & Sayings

Sly and reckless, compulsive and bold. The goat-god, with hoof and smile and hairy ears, satyr at the helm of the Play Pen. Love him, understand him, forgive him, lead him shyly to Freud, or Jesus. Or else take the contemporarily untenable position that evil, undiluted by any hint of childhood trauma, does exist in the world, exists for its own precise sake, the pustular bequest from the beast, as inexplicable as Belsen. — John D. MacDonald

I had to make a guess about what would be right and what would be wrong for her. I had to take a risk. I based the risk on what I know of loneliness, of the need of closeness in loneliness. I stroked her, totally impersonal, the way you soothe a terrified animal. At first she would leap and buck at the slightest touch. After a while there was only a tremor when I touched her, and finally that too was gone. She hiccuped and at last fell down into sleep, curled and spent. — John D. MacDonald

People cannot endure inexplicable worthlessness — John D. MacDonald

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. — John D. MacDonald

He was back at me like a cat, and he swung a hard chunk of wood from one of the smashed chairs. I caught the first one on the shoulder and I cleverly caught the next one right over the left ear. It broke a big white bell in my head, and he side-stepped, grunting for breath, and let me go down. I landed on my side, and he punted me in the belly like Groza trying for one from the mid-field stripe. — John D. MacDonald

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

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

Never leave anything which can be traced, when you do have a choice. — John D. MacDonald

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

sighed. "Bring her around sometime." She padded lithely over to me and took my wrist and looked at my watch. Her breathing had slowed. Her leotard was sweat-dark and fitted her almost as closely as her healthy hide. She beamed down at me. "I knew you'd be nice about it, Trav. She'll be here in twenty minutes." I stared up at her. "You are a con artist, McCall. — John D. MacDonald

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

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

Newsmen have a very short attention span. It is a prerequisite in the business. That is why the news accounts of almost anything make sense to all ages up to the age of twelve. If one wishes to enjoy newspapers, it is wise to halt all intellectual development right at that age. The schools are doing their level best to achieve this goal. — John D. MacDonald

Nothing goes on forever. And if you stay patient, problems tend to go away in time. — John D. MacDonald

Ask for two, and they give you the third free. — John D. MacDonald

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

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

Are you a good human being, Gerry? I mean good in the sense that if you put everything in the scales, they'd tip that way?" It startled her. "I don't know. I haven't thought of myself that way. I think I like the lush life a little too much. That's why I married George. I'm vain. I like men to admire me. I've got a coarse streak that comes out at the wrong times. But I do try to live up to ... some kind of a better image of myself. And I try to improve. I came from nothing, Trav, from a little raggedy-ass spread in the Panhandle with too many kids and too few rooms. — John D. MacDonald

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

In spite of the air conditioning, she had filled the lounge with a faint sharp-sweet odor of large overheated girl. — John D. MacDonald

It is a practical world, Mr. Owen, and we have to do practical things. — John D. MacDonald

Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every two-bit developer divert the flow into drag-lined canals that give him 'waterfront' lots to sell. As far north as Corkscrew Swamp, virgin stands of ancient bald cypress are dying. All the area north of Copeland had been logged out, and will never come back. As the glades dry, the big fires come with increasing frequency. The ecology is changing with egret colonies dwindling, mullet getting scarce, mangrove dying of new diseases born of dryness. — John D. MacDonald

She went inside and watched him walk back toward sixteen, — John D. MacDonald

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

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

Who are you? What do you want? Who are you? Her voice was light and fast and intense and her mouth trembled. She seemed to be on the narrow edge of emotional disaster, holding herself in check with the greatest effort. And about her was a rich and heavy scent of brandy, and an unsteadiness, the eyes too swift and not exactly in focus. — John D. MacDonald

Bugs would eat the wax. Chaw the old canvas. And one day there will be a mutation, and we will have new ones that can digest concrete, dissolve steel and suck up the acid puddles, fatten on magic plastics, lick their slow way through glass. Then the cities will tumble and man will be chased back into the sea from which he came ... — John D. MacDonald

How terribly dear!" she said. "How ineffably buddy-buddy! I shouldn't have gone running to him with my little heartache, Mr. McGee. It was selfish of me. It upset him, and it didn't do me any particular good. How can he check up on anything anyway? Why don't you just invent some soothing little story for him and go down and tell it to him and then go back to your beach-bum career, whatever it is? — John D. MacDonald

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

A nonreader is somebody standing there in a blindfold. — John D. MacDonald

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

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

Throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread outward from that point. Old ladies will crack skulls with their deadly handbags. Cars will plunge down the crowded sidewalks. Drivers will be torn out of their cars and stomped. It will spread to all the huge cities of the world, and by dawn of the next day there will be a horrid silence of sprawled bodies and tumbled vehicles, gutted buildings and a few wisps of smoke. And through that silence will prowl a few, a very few of the most powerful ones, ragged and bloody, slowly tracking each other down. — John D. MacDonald

the glue that seems to hold mankind in some kind of lasting stasis is everyone's desire to be useful. — John D. MacDonald

I drove out. There were a half-dozen cars there. A house man let me in. Brell came hurrying to me to pump my hand. He was a trim-bodied man in his late forties, dark and handsome in a slightly vulpine way, and I suspected he wore a very expensive and inconspicuous hair piece. He looked the type to go bald early. He had a resonant voice and a slightly theatrical presence. He wore tailored twill ranch pants and a crisp white shirt with blue piping. — John D. MacDonald

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. — John D. MacDonald

if you are too unusual, you may turn into a collector's item. — John D. MacDonald

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

The wide world is full of likable people who get kicked in the stomach regularly. — John D. MacDonald

In the morning I'm often anti-semantic. — John D. MacDonald

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

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

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

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly. — John D. MacDonald

It is that flavor exuded by women who have fashioned an earthy and simplified sexual adjustment to their environment, borne their young, achieved an unthinking physical confidence. They are often placidly unkempt, even grubby, taking no interest in the niceties of posture. They have a slow relish for the physical spectrum of food, sun, deep sleep, the needs of children, the caressess of affection. There is a tiny magnificance about them, like the sultry dignity of she-lions. — John D. MacDonald

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

I could see, in the haze to the north, the tall stacks of the mighty Borden phosphate and fertilizer plant in Bradenton, spewing lethal fluorine and sulphuric-acid components into the vacation sky. In the immediate area it is known bitterly as the place where Elsie the Cow coughed herself to death. I have read where it had been given yet another two years to correct its massive and dangerous pollution. Big Borden must have directors somewhere. Maybe, like the Penn Central directors, they are going to sit on their respective docile asses until the roof falls in. There are but two choices. Either they know they condone poisoning and don't give a damn, or they don't know they condone poisoning and don't give a damn. Anybody can walk into any brokerage office and be told where to look to find a complete list of the names of the directors and where they live. Drop the fellows a line, huh? — John D. MacDonald

For the expendable marriage, you give the expendable gift. — John D. MacDonald

He'd had a full measure of good bourbon and a fine dinner and probably some excellent brandy. It had dulled his mind slightly, and he was aware of that dullness and was consequently more careful and more suspicious than he would have been sober. He refused a drink. He lowered himself into a comfortable chair and took his time lighting his pipe. — John D. MacDonald

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

Then she would be that hostess in Houston and I would be that tanned one from Florida, a small memory of chlorinated pool water, fruit juice and gin, steak raw in the middle, and hearty rhythms in the draperied twilight of the tomb-cool motel cubicle, riding the grounded flesh of the jet-stream Valkyrie. A harmless pleasure. For harmless plastic people, scruff-proof, who can create the delusion of romance. — John D. MacDonald

Gentlemen, a pleasure talking to you. Hope I've been of some help. It's coming upon closing time, and I don't stay around here one minute more than I need to. We walked to the van. It was no longer in the shade, and hot enough inside to melt belt buckles. We talked it over and decided that the motel at Robstown had been comfortable enough and only about sixty miles away, so we decided to call it a day, but halfway there we came upon a motel in Alice that looked just about as good, and they had plenty of room, so we took a pair of singles out in the back wing of the place. The shower was a rusty trickle. The window air conditioners made a thumping roaring rattling sound, and the meat across the street was fried, but otherwise it was adequate. Good — John D. MacDonald

Please not yet. Those are the three eternal words. Please not yet. — John D. MacDonald

In explosive gasps Chook introduced us and we went inside. I could see that she was elderly by Chook's standards. Perhaps twenty-six or -seven. A brown-eyed blonde, with the helpless mournful eyes of a basset hound. She was a little weathered around the eyes. In the lounge lights I saw that the basic black had given her a lot of good use. Her hands looked a little rough. Under the slightly bouffant skirt of the black dress were those unmistakable dancer's legs, curved and trim and sinewy. — John D. MacDonald

For once her new placidity was impaired. — John D. MacDonald

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

there is one demon loose upon the world who spends all his infinite time and energy on the devising of all the vicious little coincidences which confound mankind. his specialty is to confront the unwary with coincidences so eerie, so obviously planned by a malevolent intelligence, that time itself comes to a full stop and his victim stands transfixed by a conviction of unreality, while in infra-space, the demon hugs his hairy belly, kicks his hooves in the air, rolling and gasping with silent laughter. — John D. MacDonald

The rain had washed the sunset time to a lambent beauty. — John D. MacDonald

By five minutes of four I was checked into the hotel. They had a lot of room. They had three conventions going and they still had a lot of room. Once inside the hotel, I was right back in Miami. Same scent to the chilled air, same skeptical servility, same glorious decor - as if a Brazilian architect had mated an air terminal with a manufacturer of cotton padding. Lighting, dramatic. At any moment the star of the show will step back from one of the eight (8) bars and break into song and the girlies will come prancing in. Keep those knees high, kids. Keep laughing. — John D. MacDonald

The breakfast was rather silent, but not with strain. — John D. MacDonald

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

If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck. — John D. MacDonald

You? Really now, Mr. McGee. You are spectacularly huge, and a tan that deep is almost vulgar, and you have a kind of leathery fading boyish charm, but this is not and never was a game for dilettantes, for jolly boys, for the favor-for-an-old-buddy routine. No gray-eyed wonder with a big white grin can solve anything or retrieve anything by blundering around in my life. Thanks for the gesture. But this isn't television. I don't need a big brother. So why don't you just go on back to your fun and games? — John D. MacDonald

My ward had arisen. She had slept so hard her eyes looked puffy, but she had acquainted herself with the equipment in my stainless steel galley, and she wore a pretty cotton dress, which hung just a little loosely on her, and she had taken two generous steaks out of the locker and set them out to thaw. She seemed a little more aware of the situation, shyly aware that she might be a nuisance. — John D. MacDonald

By noon, in a gray February world, we had come down through snow flurries to land at Albany, and had taken off again. When the snow ended the sky was a luminous gray. I looked down at the winter calligraphy of upstate New York, white fields marked off by the black woodlots, an etching without color, superbly restful in contrast to the smoky, guttering, grinding stink of the airplane clattering across the sky like an old commuter bus. — John D. MacDonald

Such gratitude! It hurt me to see you lose your professional standing, McGee. Like you were going soft and sentimental. So, through my own account, I put us into Fletcher and rode it up nicely and took us out, and split the bonus right down the middle. It's short-term. It's a check. Pay your taxes. Live a little. It's a longer retirement this time. We can gather up a throng and go blundering around on this licentious craft and get the remorses for saying foolish things while in our cups. We had a salvage contract, idiot, and the fee is comparatively small but fair."
"And you are comparatively large but fair."
"I think of myself that way. Where did the check go? Into the pocket so fast? Good." he looked at his watch. "I am taking a lady to lunch. Make a nice neat deck there, Captain." And away he went, humming. — John D. MacDonald

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

[Los Angeles] the world's biggest third-class city ... — John D. MacDonald

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

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

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

Anxious little smile that came and went - a mendicant — John D. MacDonald

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

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

She came back pinked, sun-dazed and slow moving, with spume-salted hair and a sandy butt, displaying upon a narrow palm, with a child's innocence, a small and perfect white shell, saying in a voice still drugged with sun and heat, "It's like the first perfect thing I ever saw, or the first shell. It's a little white suit of armor with the animal dead and gone. What does it mean when things look so clear and so meaningful? Silly little things." I sat on a low stool, hating the phone. — John D. MacDonald

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

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

Walk very lightly and carefully, Wade. Look behind every bush. — John D. MacDonald

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

Vulnerability is the curse of the thinking classes. — John D. MacDonald

The world is full of damp rocks, with some very strange creatures hiding under them. — John D. MacDonald

I do not like the killers, and the killing bravely and well crap. I do not like the bully boys, the Teddy Roosevelt's, the Hemingways, the Ruarks. They are merely slightly more sophisticated versions of the New Jersey file clerks who swarm into the Adirondacks in the fall, in red cap, beard stubble and taut hero's grin, talking out of the side of their mouths, exuding fumes of bourbon, come to slay the ferocious white-tailed deer. It is the search for balls. A man should have one chance to bring something down. He should have his shot at something, a shining running something, and see it come a-tumbling down, all mucus and steaming blood stench and gouted excrement, the eyes going dull during the final muscle spasms. And if he is, in all parts and purposes, a man, he will file that away as a part of his process of growth and life and eventual death. And if he is perpetually, hopelessly a boy, he will lust to go do it again, with a bigger beast. — John D. MacDonald

cramp began to knot my right calf and so with thumb and forefinger I pinched my nose shut with considerable force and held the pressure until the cramp faded away. A Chinese solution. Acupressure, just as steady pressure at the right point on the inside of the wrist, three finger widths from the heel of the hand, will inhibit nausea. — John D. MacDonald

I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny. — John D. MacDonald

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

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

My friend Meyer, the economist, says that cretins are the only humans who can be absolutely certain of their own sanity. All the rest of us go rocketing along rickety rails over spavined bridges and along the edge of bottomless gorges. The man who believes himself free of any taint of madness is a damned liar. — John D. MacDonald

Who the hell are you?" "A friend of a friend." "Like who?" "Marianne, works at Charlie Char-Broil." "That silly bitch hasn't got any friends." Had I done any pleading or begging, she would have slammed the door. So I stood easy, mildly smiling. It's a relaxed area. There is a code for all the transients. If you are presentable, unhurried, vaguely indifferent, it is a challenge. I was having better luck with this than I expected, up to this point. I wanted it to continue. If you push against hostility and suspicion, you merely increase it. In a few moments I saw a little less animosity. — John D. MacDonald

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

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

I talked with Junior Allen. He didn't have his mind on it. He was crouched in the brush, and he could taste lamb, and he was alerted for the first shy sound of the little hoofs coming along the trail. I gently and indirectly advanced the idea of my coming along, and he firmly closed the door. He got up and sprang nimbly onto the dock, snapped the weak dock light on, checked his lines, adjusted a fender and came aboard again, restless. — John D. MacDonald

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable. — John D. MacDonald

Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible. — John D. MacDonald

She looked at me with gentle indignation. She was what we have after sixty million years of the Cenozoic. There were a lot of random starts and dead ends. Those big plated pea-brain lizards didn't make it. Sharks, scorpions and cockroaches, as living fossils, are lasting pretty well. Savagery, venom and guile are good survival quotients. This forked female mammal didn't seem to have enough tools. One night in the swamps would kill her. Yet behind all that fragility was a marvelous toughness. A Junior Allen was less evolved. He was a skull-cracker, two steps away from the cave. They were at the two ends of our bell curve, with all the rest of us lumped in the middle. If the trend is still supposed to be up, she was of the kind we should breed, accepting sensitivity as a strength rather than a weakness. But there is too much Junior Allen seed around. — John D. MacDonald

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

She was a tall and slender woman, possibly in her early thirties. Her skin had the extraordinary fineness of grain, and the translucence you see in small children and fashion models. In her fine long hands, delicacy of wrists, floating texture of dark hair, and in the mobility of the long narrow sensitive structuring of her face there was the look of something almost too well made, too highly bred, too finely drawn for all the natural crudities of human existence. Her eyes were large and very dark and tilted and set widely. She wore dark Bermuda shorts and sandals and a crisp blue and white blouse, no jewelry of any kind, a sparing touch of lipstick. — John D. MacDonald

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

The early bird who gets the worm works for somebody who comes in late and owns the worm farm. — John D. MacDonald

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

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