Ross MacDonald's Quotes

An ugly woman with an ugly gun is a terrible thing.

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.

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.

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.

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

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

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

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

Money costs too much.

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

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

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

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

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.

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.

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

When there's trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weakest member. And all the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble.

In business everyone is out to grab, to fight, to win. Either you are the under or the over dog. It is up to you to be on top.

I simply don't believe in failure. In itself, it doesn't exist. We create it. We make ourselves fail.

Much of the success of life depends upon keeping one's mind open to opportunity and seizing it when it comes.

Success is an absurd, erratic thing. She arrives when one least expects her and after she has come may depart again almost because of a whim.

Poverty is relative, and the lack of food and of the necessities of life is not necessarily a hardship. Spiritual and social ostracism, the invasion of your privacy, are what constitute the pain of poverty.