Ross Macdonald Quotes & Sayings

If you can't pass on a little loving-kindness in this world, you might as well be a gopher in a hole. — Ross Macdonald

As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him, the women he likes are getting older too. The trouble is that most of them are married. — Ross Macdonald

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters. — Ross Macdonald

You are joking. You must want money. You work for money, don't you?"
"I want it very badly," I said. "But I can't take this money. It wouldn't belong to me, I would belong to it. It would expect me to do things, and I would have to do them. Sit on the lid of this mess of yours, the way Marfeld did, until dry rot sets in. — Ross Macdonald

We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete. — Ross Macdonald

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

The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake. — Ross Macdonald

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure. — Ross Macdonald

The tea tasted like a clear dark dripping from the past. My grandmother came back with it, in crisp black funeral silks, — Ross Macdonald

Neighborhood grocery stores, coal yards, gas stations, cheap taverns, big old rundown houses, a few churches with blank embarrassed faces. — Ross Macdonald

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

The sun burned like a fire ship on the water, sinking slowly till only a red smoke was left trailing up the sky. A fishing boat was headed into the harbor, black and small against the enormous west. Above its glittering wake a few gulls whirled like sparks which had gone out. — Ross Macdonald

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. — Ross Macdonald

There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure. — Ross Macdonald

He had pink butterfly ears. The rest of him was still in the larval stage. — Ross Macdonald

The smile that folded the puffed eyelids and creased the sagging cheeks was fixed and forced. I'd seen such smiles in mortuaries on the false face of death. It reminded me that I was going to grow old and die. — Ross Macdonald

A young man with an untrimmed beard and rebellious eyes looked like a conscientious objector to everything. — Ross Macdonald

An ugly woman with an ugly gun is a terrible thing. — Ross Macdonald

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. — Ross Macdonald

She touched his shoulder, very lightly, like a child fingering a forbidden object. — Ross Macdonald

Crimes often come in pairs. — Ross Macdonald

Hate is usually a more compelling motive than love, — Ross Macdonald

No one looks at the mountains. But they were there, making them all look silly. — Ross Macdonald

Some of us start out whole and stay that way.
Some need a spare part or two.
Henry - he was a bits-and-pieces kind of guy — Ross Macdonald

She was trouble looking for somebody to happen to. — Ross Macdonald

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. — Ross Macdonald

No more guns for you. — Ross Macdonald

His eyes held the confident vacancy that comes from the exercise of other people's power. — Ross Macdonald

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

Now take it easy. This is a gun I have at your back. Don't you feel it?"
I felt it. I took it easy. — Ross Macdonald

The problem was to love people, try to serve them, without wanting anything from them. I was a long way from solving that one. — Ross Macdonald

Graff was floating on his back in the pool when George Wall and I went outside. His brown belly swelled above its surface like the humpback of a Galapagos tortoise. Mrs. Graff, fully clothed, was sitting by herself in a sunny corner. Her black dress and black hair seemed to annul the sunlight. Her face and body had the distinction that takes the place of beauty in people who have suffered long and hard. — Ross Macdonald

Why wasn't he arrested?" "He was, but they couldn't convict him. Don't ask me why. Ask the politicians that ran the cops in New York and Jersey and Cleveland and the other places. Ask the people that voted for the politicians. — Ross Macdonald

dozed off with my consciousness slightly ajar. — Ross Macdonald

All you men still have the Victorian hangover. I suppose you think woman's place is in the home, too?"
"Not my home. — Ross Macdonald

I felt like a lonely cat, an aging tom ridden by obscure rage, looking for torn-ear trouble. I clipped that pitch off short and threw it away. Night streets were my territory, and would be till I rolled in the last gutter. — Ross Macdonald

Anton was in his office, short and wide behind the desk in a gabardine suit the color of lemon ice cream. His face was sunlamp brown. — Ross Macdonald

innocent, as if they perceived only pre-selected facts. — Ross Macdonald

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. — Ross Macdonald

He gave me an appealing look, which fell with a thud between us: — Ross Macdonald

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

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

daughter?' 'She was a beautiful child.' Mrs Williams's eyes grew misty with the quasi-maternal feelings of a procuress. — Ross Macdonald

A woman of about sixty answered the door. She had blue-white hair and a look on her face you don't see too often any more, the look of a woman who hasn't been disappointed: 'Yes, — Ross Macdonald

She held her shoulders straighter, and her breasts were bold. — Ross Macdonald

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness. — Ross Macdonald

As I stood there absorbing Hammett's novel, the slot machines at the back of the shop were clanking and whirring, and in the billiard room upstairs the perpetual poker game was being played. — Ross Macdonald

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

He hadn't wanted to be helped the way I wanted to help him, the way that helped me. — Ross Macdonald

I had a counter impulse to walk out of the bar and away from the Hacienda and her. She was trouble looking for somebody to happen to. And succeeding. I raised my drink and said with false cheer: 'Luck to the gold drinkers.' She sipped at hers.'You didn't say what kind of luck, good or bad. Not that it matters, people don't get their wishes. Wishing-wells are to drown in. But I mustn't go on like that. I'm always pitying myself, and that's neurotic.' She made a visible effort, and focused her attention on me: 'Speaking of luck, you don't as if you had too much luck in your life. Some of the kicks you say you go for were kicks in the head, I bet'. — Ross Macdonald

Some men spend their lives looking for ways to punish themselves for having been born. — Ross Macdonald

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present. — Ross Macdonald

How can a man help breaking the law when he don't have money to live on? — Ross Macdonald

I went through a living room crowded with overstuffed furniture in a green-and-white jungle design from which eyes seemed to watch me, down a short hallway past a pink satin bedroom which reminded me of the inside of a coffin in disarray, to the open door of a bathroom. Tom's jacket lay across the threshold like the headless torso of a man, flattened by the passage of some enormous engine. — Ross Macdonald

He looked like a sleepwalker waking up on the verge of a precipice. — Ross Macdonald

As a man writes his fiction, his fiction is writing him. We can never change ourselves back into what we were, any more than I can change these printed words. So we have to be careful about what we write. — Ross Macdonald

I'm a sharpshooter. I still don't like to kill a man. It's too damn easy to wipe one out and too damn hard to grow one. — Ross Macdonald

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. — Ross Macdonald

Behind the semi-elliptical bar four cowboys who had never been near a cow sang western songs which sounded as if they had originated in the far east. — Ross Macdonald

Like other self-educated men, he was vain of his vocabulary. — Ross Macdonald

Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder. I learned that at my mother's knee and other low joints, — Ross Macdonald

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii. — Ross Macdonald

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

Jerkiness isn't as respectable as it used to be, not even in L.A. Which is why they had to build Vegas. — Ross Macdonald

You notice things."
"A sexburger like her I notice." The tip of his tongue protruded between his teeth, which were a good grade of plastic. — Ross Macdonald

She said surprisingly, in a voice as thin as a flute:
"Are you a good man?"
"I like to think so," but her candor stopped me. "No," I said, "I'm not. I keep trying, when I remember to, but it keeps getting tougher every year. Like trying to chin yourself with one hand. You can practice off and on all your life, and never make it. — Ross Macdonald

It was a small room, and it was as crowded with coffee- and end-tables, chairs and hassocks and bookcases, as a second-hand furniture store. The horizontal surfaces were littered with gewgaws, shells and framed photographs, vases and pincushions and doilies. If the lady had come down in the world, she'd brought a lot down with her. My sensation of stepping into the past was getting too strong for comfort. The half-armed chair closed on me like a hand. — Ross Macdonald

For answer, he threw off the covers, swung his legs over the edge of the high bed, reached for the floor with his bare feet, and stood up tottering. Then he fell forward onto his knees, his head swinging loose, slack as a killed buck. — Ross Macdonald

I found when I followed the driveway around to the back that behind its imposing front it was just another tract house, as if the architect had tried to combine a southern plantation mansion with the slave quarters. — Ross Macdonald

It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course, the room was large and reasonably well-lighted, and the girl had other things than me on her mind. — Ross Macdonald

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

At the chinks in the drawn blinds, daylight peered like a spy. — Ross Macdonald

Pretty was hardly the word. With her fierce curled lips, black eyes and clean angry bones she must have stood out in her graduating class like a chicken hawk in a flock of pullets. — Ross Macdonald

An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing. — Ross Macdonald

There was some kind of passion between them. It gave off a faint wrong smoky odor, like something burning where it shouldn't be, arson committed by children playing with matches. I — Ross Macdonald

On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession. — Ross Macdonald

My half-suppressed Canadian years, my whole childhood and youth, rose like a corpse from the bottom of the sea to confront me. — Ross Macdonald

A moon like a fallen fruit reversing gravity was hoisting itself above the rooftops. — Ross Macdonald

I wondered if we were doing him a favor. The Galton household had hot and cold running money piped in from an inexhaustible reservoir. But money was never free. Like any other commodity, it had to be paid for. — Ross Macdonald

The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution. — Ross Macdonald

We treat the crime capital of the United States as if it was a second Disneyland, smelling like roses, a great place to take the family or hold a convention. — Ross Macdonald

There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a year. — Ross Macdonald

...Miss Seeley came in.... She was a little older, a little thinner. Her tailored pinstriped suit emphasized the boniness of her figure. But she still wore hopeful white ruffles at her wrists and throat. — Ross Macdonald

Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence. — Ross Macdonald

She put her hands over her ears and made a monkey face. Even then, she couldn't look ugly. She had such good bones, her skeleton would have been an ornament in any closet. — Ross Macdonald

The sun, heavy and red, was almost down on the horizon now. Its image floated like spilled fire on the water. The — Ross Macdonald

I'm sick of always doing the professional thing for prudential reasons.' I — Ross Macdonald

I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need. — Ross Macdonald

I had reached the point when I could not see anything clearly ahead, I needed help, and I got it. — Ross Macdonald

When I stepped out of my car the night shot up like a tree and branched wide into blossoming masses of stars. Under their far cold lights I felt weak and little. If a fruit fly lived for one day instead of two, it hardly seemed to matter. Except to another fruit fly. — Ross Macdonald

Mrs. Gley came down in a rush. She had on a kind of tea gown whose draperies flew out behind her, like the tail of a blowzy comet. — Ross Macdonald

I learned a great deal from [Raymond] Chandler - any writer can - but there had always been basic differences between us. One was in our attitude to plot. Chandler described a good plot as one that made for good scenes, as if the parts were greater than the whole. I see plot as a vehicle of meaning. It should be as complex as contemporary life, but balanced enough to say true things about it. The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure. Which means that the structure must be single, and intended. — Ross Macdonald

Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when you draw a blank, and the ash-blonde ghosts of the past carry on long twittering long-distance calls with your inner ear, and there's no way to hang up. — Ross Macdonald

Don't be silly," he said uncertainly. "Now, what's your problem? If you think you're broke, I'm broker, ask my broker. — Ross Macdonald

A taste of whiskey had changed her mood, as a touch of acid will change the color of blue litmus paper. — Ross Macdonald

The fire bit into my legs like a rabid fox. — Ross Macdonald

I took the conch shell and set it to my ear. Its susurrus sounded less like the sea than the labored breathing of a tiring runner. No doubt I heard what I was listening for. — Ross Macdonald

Vallon was said to have a Puritan conscience but I had never met his conscience. — Ross Macdonald

He placed me in a straight chair against the wall, brought me an ashtray, sat at his desk with his back to the window. He was quick in movement, very still in repose. His bald scalp and watchful eyes made him resemble a lizard waiting for a fly to expose itself. — Ross Macdonald

He made a production out of answering her, marching around to her side of the car, carrying his belly in front of him like a gift. — Ross Macdonald