I was heavily into John D. MacDonald.

I think Rory MacDonald is a great striker, I think Jorge Masvidal is an excellent striker.

Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.

If you see my fights with Jake Ellenberger, Johny Hendricks and Rory MacDonald, I went out there and just had fun.

'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.

I'm sure that people must say about me, on the screen, 'Good gracious, is Jeanette MacDonald going to take off her clothes - again?

The tortured similes, the brooding introspection, the jaundiced view of society - nobody ever has any fun in a Ross Macdonald book.

My literary heroes all wrote about L.A.: Joseph Wambaugh, Ross Macdonald, and Raymond Chandler were the three writers that made me want to be a writer.

I would say 'The Chill' by Ross Macdonald is sort of a prototypical example of how the private detective genre elevates itself to the level of literature.

Building on the work of George Macdonald, William Morris and Edward Plunkett, what became known as high fantasy was more or less invented by J. R. R. Tolkien.

I had a great first year and Mr. MacDonald was my biggest supporter. He gave me the encouragement I needed that first year to get my career started on a positive note.

I wound up adopting two dogs from Sochi. It wasn't really me who brought them home as much as it was one of my best friends, Robin Macdonald, who was out there with me.

I believed I could knock out Rory MacDonald, Johny Hendricks and Jake Ellenberger, and sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't, but I know I can knock these guys out.

I devour history books. I love anything by Thomas B. Costain or George MacDonald Fraser. He writes magnificent history, and he also wrote the Flashman stories, which are irresistible.

What brought me to the table was Raymond Chandler and, to a lesser degree, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett. I was basically inspired to want to write like the classic private-eye writers.

It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.

If Sir John A. MacDonald or any other leader of that day were here now, he would have a different program from that of sixty years ago. He sought to give his people policies suited to the time in which he lived.

If it hadn't been for Bill Macdonald's book 'The True Intrepid,' I might never have found out about the women who went down to work in secret in New York for our own spymaster Sir William Stephenson in the Second World War.

Anjelica Huston and Kelly MacDonald are both really special. Anjelica has such a fresh point of view about acting and doesn't seem jaded at all. She seems more like a student and yet she is veteran actor who really brings it.

When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank.

My wife and I have this discussion all the time. Her primal influences are J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Mine are Rudyard Kipling, Edith Nesbit and T.H. White. So, we have certain structural differences in form and content right off the bat!

In crime fiction, I cut my teeth on early Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, and Alan Furst. I always loved the writing of Hemingway and Faulkner. Cormac McCarthy's 'Border Trilogy' has been a huge influence; I think I read those novels four times.

I think there are rock stars within every subgenre, and for people who are obsessed with musical theater Sutton Foster and Audra MacDonald are like Beyonce to them. I'm sure the a cappella world has their own version of that, and that exists in every geeky subculture.

I was raised on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Something about this genre - hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold - never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator.

It's good to have a foothold in reality, a base somewhere that's always been a base. Sharman Macdonald once said she needs life to write; she can't write if she's just in theatre all the time. I'm the same way, I think. I've always felt that if my life was all about the job, I wouldn't be so good at the job.

I'm not particularly ethnically Scottish; I have one grandfather who is Scottish, although he's called Macdonald, and you don't get a lot more Scottish than that. The Scottish part of my family are from Skye, and I've always been very aware of that - always been very attracted to Scottish subject matter, I guess.

Share This Page