Ross MacDonald Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Money costs too much.”

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

“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.”

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