168 Quotes by John D. MacDonald

A nonreader is somebody standing there in a blindfold.

[To] me organized religion, the formalities and routines, [is] like being marched in formation to look at a sunset.

All thinking is done with the glands. Logic is added later to tidy things up.

The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.

Night and gin and music-the right setting for peeling off the thin clinging layers of bullshit and finding one's way down closer to the essential self.

If you would be thrilled by watching the galloping advance of a major glacier, you'd be ecstatic watching changes in publishing.

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.

If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.

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 any grasshoppers. When the critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm, and try to eat the world. We're nearing a critical point. One day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. But this time they won't snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each others