John D. MacDonald

“The trap is when you start to pay attention to that stuff, you get caught up in it.”

“Credit is the only thing that can be stolen without the owner being aware of it.”

“Property is a trap. It is a way of remaining attached to the earth.”

“Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.”

“There are no hundred-percent heroes.”

“There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance.”

“All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.”

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

“Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will.”

“We are all honorable men here, we do not have to give each other assurances as if we were lawyers.”

“A man who is not a fool can be a fool in love.”

“You are a coward when you even let yourself think about getting rid of a problem by getting rid of a person.”

“The only people who can be psychologically hurt are people who don't know who they are.”

“Maturity is the ability to joyfully live with the fact that you don't know.”

“A cliché is a cliché because it is true.”

“The first rule of survival is to believe in your own luck.”

“The successful man is the one who finds out what is the matter with his business before his competitors do.”