John D. MacDonald Quotes

27 quotes in 466 categories

• Friendships like marriages are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• If you would be thrilled by watching the galloping advance of a major glacier, you'd be ecstatic watching changes in publishing.
• 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…
• When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it makes you take a closer look at your own.
• The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.
• 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…
• 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…
• The only thing that prisons demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.
• 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…
• People cannot endure inexplicable worthlessness
• Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather.
• To enjoy enduring success we should travel a little in advance of the world.
• We have been endowed with the capacity and the power to create desirable pictures within and to find them automatically in the outer world of…
• [To] me organized religion, the formalities and routines, [is] like being marched in formation to look at a sunset.
• A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

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