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

Ross Macdonald

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Ross Macdonald
Age: 67 †
Born: 1915
Born: December 13
Died: 1983
Died: July 11
Architect
Novelist
Writer
Los Gatos
California
Kenneth Millar
John Macdonald
John Ross Macdonald
Structure
Concludes
Novel
Detective
Running
Detectives
Vibrations
Backward
Tragic
Surprise
Entire

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I like a little danger. Tame danger, controlled by me. It gives me a sense of power, I guess, to take my life in my hands and know damn well I’m not going to lose it.
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I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it our ourselves.
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The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters.
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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.
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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.
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Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.
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