Ross MacDonald
Ross MacDonald
David Ross MacDonaldis a Canadian sailor. He began sailing at the age of 11...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 December 1915
CityLos Gatos, CA
CountryUnited States of America
frightened rattlesnakes sensitivity
The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.
archer kind novel
The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.
lying heart envy
Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.
wall book language
The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.
gun ugly terrible
An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.
trying influence made
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.
memories moving sea
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.
trouble allowance members
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.
writing life-and-death needs
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.
responsibility thinking evil
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.
writing years letters
There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a year.
wall book past
The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters.
broken wish locks
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.
running detectives vibrations
The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.