John Dann MacDonald (1916–86) was an American writer of novels and short stories, known for his thrillers. MacDonald was a prolific author of crime and suspense novels, many of them set in his adopted home of Florida. His best-known works include the popular and critically acclaimed Travis McGee series, and his novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1972, MacDonald was named a grandmaster of the Mystery Writers of America, and he won a 1980 U.S. National Book Award in the one-year category Mystery. Stephen King praised MacDonald as “the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller.” Kingsley Amis said, MacDonald “is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?”
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To enjoy enduring success we should travel a little in advance of the world.
—John D. MacDonald
Topics: Excellence
A set definite objective must be established if we are to accomplish anything in a big way.
—John D. MacDonald
Topics: Goals
You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.
—John D. MacDonald
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.
—John D. MacDonald
Topics: Cheating, Integrity
Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.
—John D. MacDonald
Topics: Friendship
We have been endowed with the capacity and the power to create desirable pictures within and to find them automatically in the outer world of our environment.
—John D. MacDonald
Topics: Imagination
The intensity of your desire governs the power with which the force is directed.
—John D. MacDonald
Topics: Desire, Desires
You return and again take the proper course, guided by what?—By the picture in mind of the place you are headed for…
—John D. MacDonald
Topics: Goals
Your mind, which is yourself, can be likened to a house. The first necessary move then, is to rid that house of all but furnishings essential to success.
—John D. MacDonald
Topics: Compromise
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