John D. MacDonald

Award won Role or nomination

1. 1916 age 0

   Born

2. 1962 age 46

   CreditCape Fearscreenwriter

3. 1986 age 70

   Died

• BHBernard Herrmann1 title
• MBMartin Balsam1 title
• GTGeorge Tomasini1 title
• GPGregory Peck1 title
• EPEdward Platt1 title
• JKJack Kruschen1 title
• TSTelly Savalas1 title
• JWJames R. Webb1 title
• RMRobert Mitchum1 title
• MWMary Wills1 title

• I am wary of a lot of things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny. I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.

  John D. MacDonald, CC BY-SA 4.0

• These are the playmate years, and they are demonstrably fraudulent. The scene is reputed to be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhausting quantity, but there is a curious tastelessness about them. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of much value to anyone else. They become a pretty little convenience, like a guest towel. And the cute little things they say, and their dainty little squeals of pleasure and release are as contrived as the embroidered initials on the guest towels. Only a woman of pride, complexity and emotional tension is genuinely worthy of the act of love, and there are only two ways to get yourself one of them. Either you lie, and stain the relationship with your own sense of guile, or you accept the involvement, the emotional responsibility, the permanence she must by nature crave. I love you can be said only two ways.

  John D. MacDonald, CC BY-SA 4.0

• But most of the wistful rabbits marry their unskilled men, and keep right on working. And discover the end of the dream. They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits, charge plates, diaper service, percale sheets, friends for dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home projector, and eternal whimsical romance — with crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson dialogue. So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician’s world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and precarious. These are the slums of the heart. Bless the bunnies. These are the new people, and we are making no place for them. We hold the dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally say sorry you can't have any. And the schools where we teach them non-survival are gloriously architectured. They will never live in places so fine, unless they

  John D. MacDonald, CC BY-SA 4.0

• ...it is like what we have done to chickens. Forced growth under optimum conditions, so that in eight weeks they are ready for the mechanical picker. The most forlorn and comical statements are the ones made by the grateful young who say Now I can be ready in two years and nine months to go out in and earn a living rather than wasting 4 years in college. Education is something that should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefor. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man’s reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why? Today the good ones, the ones who want to ask why, find no one around with any interest in answering the question, so they drop out, because theirs is the type of mind which becomes monstrously bored at the trade-school concept. A devoted technician is seldom an educated man. He can be a useful man, a contented man, a busy man. But he has no more sense of the mystery and wonder and p

  John D. MacDonald, CC BY-SA 4.0

• It would be one kind of penance. And there are never enough kinds. Not for him. Not for me. And certainly not for you, my friend.

  John D. MacDonald, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Three cents’ worth of squeeze bottles, plus two cents’ worth of homogenized goo, plus prime-time television equals 28 million annual sales at 69 cents each. This is the heartbeat of industrial America.

  John D. MacDonald, CC BY-SA 4.0