John D. MacDonald Quotes

Once, as she was getting sleepy, she looked somberly at me and said, I guess there are a lot of people like me. We react too soon or too late or not at all. We’re jumpy people, and we don’t seem to be...

So!So?So I don't think you drove that one off. So it was her choice. So she isn't the kind who says it is for good and then come back all of a sudden. With her, gone is gone. So if I were you, I would...

That is the flaw in my personality. Vanity. And your flaw is sentimentality. They are the flaws which will inevitably kill us both.

The intelligence of a mob can be determined by dividing the lowest IQ present by the number of people in the mob.

You’re so bright, Trav, and so intuitive about people. And you have … the gift of tenderness. And sympathy. You could be almost anything. Of course! I said, springing to my feet and beginning to pace...

But these are the last remaining years of choice. In the stainless nurseries of the future, the feds will work their way through all the squalling pinkness tattooing a combination tax number and credi...

But when they don’t wear helmets, they abuse the taxpayers, taking a couple of weeks to die in intensive care, their primitive brains jellied by hard impact with the concrete highway. Somebody has to...

Gian Gravina? ‘A bore is a person who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.’ 

He was in a gigantic circular bed, with a pink canopy over it. In all the luxuriant femininity of that big bedroom, George looked shrunken and misplaced, like a dead worm in a birthday cake.

I drove back into town, full of the look of her, full of the impact of her. It was an impact that made the day, the trees, the city, all look more vivid. Her face was special and clear in my mind—the...

I have no stomach for surprises. I have endured too many of them. They upset me. The elimination of all removable risk is the most plausible way of staying alive.

I know just enough about myself to know I cannot settle for one of those simplifications which indignant people seize upon to make understandable a world too complex for their comprehension. Astrology...

I switched the FM-UHF marine radio to the commercial frequencies and tried to find something that didn't sound like somebody trying to break up a dogfight in a sorority house by banging drums and cymb...

In every contact with every other human in every day of your life, you become what you sense they want of you or, if you are motivated the other way, exactly what they do not want.

In the morning I'm often anti-semantic.

It is a practical world, Mr. Owen, and we have to do practical things.

New York is where it is going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust population reaches a certain density, they all act like...

Nina came out—gloved, pursed, be-hatted, wearing a fall suit a little too tailored for her structure—came out with a frail and indefinite-looking man and paused to argue with him, saying, Freddie, if...

Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in it...

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-...