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:

I knew how it was with drunks. They ran out of generosity, even for themselves.

Ross Macdonald

An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

Ross Macdonald

The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.

Ross Macdonald

Money costs too much.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ross Macdonald

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

Ross Macdonald

Every witness has his own way of creeping up on the truth.

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.

Ross Macdonald

The moral beatings that people took from their children, I was thinking, were the hardest to endure and the hardest to escape.

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.

Ross Macdonald

Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.

Ross Macdonald

No more guns for you.

Ross Macdonald

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

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.

Ross Macdonald

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

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.

Ross Macdonald