ROSS MACDONALD

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

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

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.

I had reached the point when I could not see anything clearly ahead, I needed help, and I got it.

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.

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.

How can a man help breaking the law when he don't have money to live on?

There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a year.

Money costs too much.

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.

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

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

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

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

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.

My half-suppressed Canadian years, my whole childhood and youth, rose like a corpse from the bottom of the sea to confront me.

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.

I like a little danger. Tame danger, controlled by me. It gives me a sense of power, I guess, to take my life in my hands and know damn well I’m not going to lose it.

We're all in the game. We all drive cars, and we're all hooked on oil. The question is how we can get unhooked before we drown in the stuff.

The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.

I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through the motions.

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

I have a secret passion for mercy. . . but justice is what keeps happening to people.