Michael Marshall Smith Quotes

You have to accept gifts occasionally, because there are some things you can’t give yourself

Everything you've done, everything you've seen, everything you've become, remains. You never can go back, only forward, and if you don't bring the whole of yourself with you, you'll never see the sun again.

You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live. Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down.

Being truly aimless is like being dead. It may even be the same thing, or worse. It is the aimless who find the wrong roads, and drive down them, simply because they have nowhere else to go.

When you meet someone you love, then you change for good. That’s why the other person will never know or understand the earlier you, and why you can never change back. And why, when that person starts to go, you’ll feel the tear deep in your heart long before your head has the slightest clue what’s going on.

Hell is being alive, and being alive is all there is.

Making something secret makes it too important, elevates it to the point where it runs your life from the shadows. If you hide what's at your core from other people for too long, sooner or later you end up hiding it from yourself and waking up with no idea of who you are.

It's simply the way things are when people come together out of hurt rather than happiness. When you try to use people as band-aids you merely reinfect the wound, and every moment you spend with them is like a speck of glass working itself deeper into your flesh.

Love and death are very similar. They're the times in your life when you most want to believe in magic, when you yearn for some symbolic act or retrospective edit that can change the world you find yourself in.

First time you hear something, it sounds outlandish and broken and like it doesn't make sense. But once it's been in your head awhile it's as if the other thoughts in there wriggle out of the way to give it some room.

Death is real. Death changes things. Everything else is filler, merely a message from our sponsor.

Scrivener is where I live. I'm planning the next novel, two screenplays and a couple of short stories with it and it's amazing how fluid the software makes the process. I genuinely think this is the biggest software advance for writers since the word processor.

My limited experience of such things told me that you get closest to the truth by not giving it advance warning that you're coming after it.

You haven't seen untidiness until you've seen a room where gravity has failed twice in different directions.

When a writer with a voice as good as Richard Christian Matheson's tells you something, you have no choice but to listen. In THE RITUAL OF ILLUSION the voices are legion, and the gaps between their testimonies drag us closer to understanding the darkly beating heart of all our, ephemeral, transfixing dreams. Dark, subtle, horrifically funny.

Nobody likes to see a body, but it's better than seeing a ghost. Bodies just make you doubt the world and the people in it. Ghosts make you doubt everything, and to doubt it in a part of the mind that has no words to answer the question, where the comforting promises you make yourself are neither believed nor even really understood.

One of the most subtle and powerful writers of dark fiction - a unique voice.