Ross Macdonald quotes

Ross Macdonald was an American-Canadian writer, celebrated for his influential detective novels featuring private eye Lew Archer. His works contributed greatly to the hard-boiled crime genre and explored themes of family secrets and psychological depth. He became known for elevating detective fiction to a form of social and literary art. Here are 23 of his quotes:

Nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean wouldn't cure. (Ross Macdonald)
I knew how it was with drunks. They ran out of generosity, even for themselves. View quote
Ross Macdonald
An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing. View quote
Ross Macdonald
The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake. View quote
Ross Macdonald
Money costs too much. View quote
Ross Macdonald
You have a secret passion for justice. Why don't you admit it?" "I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people. View quote
Ross Macdonald
They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through mountains, cut down a thousand year of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn't touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn't be tainted. View quote
Ross Macdonald
Deep feeling sounded in her voice. I had no doubt that the feeling was partly sincere. Still, there was something unreal about it. I suspected that she'd been playing tricks with her emotions for a long time, until none of them was quite valid. View quote
Ross Macdonald
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. View quote
Ross Macdonald
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. View quote
Ross Macdonald
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. (Ross Macdonald)
The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters. View quote
Ross Macdonald
Every witness has his own way of creeping up on the truth. View quote
Ross Macdonald
When your income passes a certain point you lose touch. All of a sudden the other people look like geeks or gooks, expendables. View quote
Ross Macdonald
The moral beatings that people took from their children, I was thinking, were the hardest to endure and the hardest to escape. View quote
Ross Macdonald
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. View quote
Ross Macdonald
Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence. View quote
Ross Macdonald
No more guns for you. View quote
Ross Macdonald
Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart. View quote
Ross Macdonald
There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a year. View quote
Ross Macdonald
The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness. (Ross Macdonald)
The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure. View quote
Ross Macdonald
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. View quote
Ross Macdonald