David Ross MacDonald Quotes

• 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.

  David 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.

  David 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.

  David Ross MacDonald

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

  David Ross MacDonald

• The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

  David Ross MacDonald

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

  David Ross MacDonald

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

  David Ross MacDonald

• Money costs too much.

  David 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.

  David Ross MacDonald

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

  David Ross MacDonald

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

  David Ross MacDonald

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

  David Ross MacDonald

• Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

  David 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.

  David Ross MacDonald

• 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.

  David 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.

  David Ross MacDonald

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

  David Ross MacDonald

David Ross MacDonald (17)

Nationality:	Australian
Profession:	Guitarist, Lyricist, Singer

About

David Ross Macdonald is a guitarist and singer/songwriter who is also known as the drummer for Australian folk band The Waifs.
Born into a musical household in Millicent, Australia, David Ross MacDonald says of his childhood, “There were always instruments to muck around with at home.

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Births

• 1915 - Barbara Billingsley
• 1962 - Mark Ruffalo
• 1938 - Lucien Bouchard
• 1905 - Kenneth Rexroth
• 1944 - Mary Archer

Deaths

• 1899 - Dwight L. Moody
• 1906 - Robert Rainy
• 1989 - Samuel Beckett
• 1987 - Sir Henry Thomas Cotton
• 2001 - Lance Loud