Explore Quotes by John D. Macdonald

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

Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather.

People cannot endure inexplicable worthlessness

If you would be thrilled by watching the galloping advance of a major glacier, you'd be ecstatic watching changes in publishing.

Now it stands to reason, mister, any damn fool stares into the sun long enough, he'll end up seeing exactly what some other damn fool tells him he's going to see.

It's no good telling somebody they're trying too hard. It's very much like ordering a child to go stand in a corner for a half hour and never once think about elephants.

I am not suited to the role of going around selling the life-can-be-beautiful idea. It can be, indeed. But you don't buy the concept from your friendly door-to-door lecture salesman.

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

Up with life. Stamp out all small and large indignities. Leave everyone alone to make it without pressure. Down with hurting. Lower the standard of living. Do without plastics. Smash the servo-mechanisms. Stop grabbing. Snuff the breeze and hug the kids. Love all love. Hate all hate.

Old friend, there are people—young and old—that I like, and people that I do not like. The former are always in short supply. I am turned off by humorless fanaticism, whether it's revolutionary mumbo-jumbo by a young one, or loud lessons from scripture by and old one. We are all comical, touching, slapstick animals, walking on our hind legs, trying to make it a noble journey from womb to tomb, and the people who can't see it all that way bore hell out of me.

When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it makes you take a closer look at your own.

The only thing that prisons demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.

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

Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.

If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.

I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess that we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.