51 Quotes by Michael Marshall Smith

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.

In the beginning was the word. So what do you do when the words won’t come? When you don’t know what happens next? You just keep typing.

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

Everyone’s alone in their world, because everybody’s life is different. 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.

Hell is not a place. It’s not a noun, child. It’s a verb.

The realest and scariest monsters are internal demons, the specters of regret and guilt and lack of fulfillment, awareness of the entropic end of love, or the first shivers occasioned by the realization of our own ageing, and the eventual inevitability of death.

You can’t have made-up things in made-up stories. But in real life, you can.

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.

My father used to claim that inanimate objects hate us and plot our downfall behind our backs. He was probably right.