Michael Marshall Smith Quotes & Sayings

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. — Michael Marshall Smith

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

I wash with the can of water I set aside the night before, and eat whatever I put next to it. The washing is not strictly necessary but, again, I have always found it a good way to greet the day. You wash after a period of work, after all, and what else is a night of sleep, if not work, or a journey at least? ("The Things He Said") — Michael Marshall Smith

You know when you've got nothing in particular to do, nothing to stay awake for? When your life is just routine and it doesn't feel like it belongs to you, how you feel tired and listless and everything seems like too much effort?
Well, it's like that, but it's much worse, because everything is much worse these days. Everything that's bad is worse, believe me. There are whole Neighborhoods out there where no one has anything to do all their lives. They're born, and from the moment they hit the table, there's nothing to do. They clamber to their feet occasionally, realize there's nothing to do and sit down again. They grow up, and there's nothing to do; they grow up, and there's still nothing. They spend their whole lives indoors, in armchairs, in bed, wondering who they are. — Michael Marshall Smith

would be on top of me like a ton of heavy things. — Michael Marshall Smith

Though we all inhabit the same place during the day, at night each one of us is hurled into a several world. — Michael Marshall Smith

Everything feels like a badly designed computer game in which you fall into a pit that doesn't kill you but from which there's absolutely no escape. For a while you kick against the walls, but the walls get higher no matter how hard and fast you press all the buttons you can find. And sooner or later you'll realize there's one you haven't tried yet. The power switch.[ ... ] So she began reaching for the button herself, but she never tried quite hard enough, because some part of her was still alive. She didn't want to throw the machine away. She just wanted to start again. — Michael Marshall Smith

And only when that happens do you realise just how much silence there really is. Silence between lovers, when something really needs to be said; silence from a parent when a child needs some word more than anything else in the world; silences and in betweens and everything which isn't an answer. — Michael Marshall Smith

Hey presto: time travel. You don't need a time machine, it turns out, you just need a friend to laugh like a teenager. Chronology shivers. — Michael Marshall Smith

All non-smokers seem to live in the belief that smokers have wandered naively through life, bereft of the knowledge that their habit is extremely bad for them. — Michael Marshall Smith

the kind of beards which make you look like you've glued a racoon to your face. The — Michael Marshall Smith

Hell is being alive, and being alive is all there is. — Michael Marshall Smith

You have to accept gifts occasionally, because there are some things you can't give yourself — Michael Marshall Smith

Deep inside each of us is a part that mistrusts order and craves the relief of seeing the world shatter into the chaos it believes lies underneath all along. — Michael Marshall Smith

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. — Michael Marshall Smith

Cross-legged on the floor, you drink, hoping each mouthful will hurt; occasional flurries of spastic movement as you try to work out what to do with your hands. When everyone else is gone, your world is just a tiny box with the walls pressing in. Messages on the phone you can't bear to play, much less listen to, and nothing in the apartment that you can recognize as meaningfully yours. — Michael Marshall Smith

Storyboarded by the West Coast's finest, the ceiling celebrated the exploits of that most durable of action heroes - God. — Michael Marshall Smith

Of our jobs are bad jobs, but they're the kind held by people in the background. People who are getting by. People who don't play pool that well. — 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. — Michael Marshall Smith

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

Bodies are great, and I wouldn't go anywhere without mine, but sometimes they're so disappointing. If — Michael Marshall Smith

If people knew that I really am what I say I am,' he said, 'you know they'd never forgive me.'
'Don't worry,' I said, 'Your lack of a secret is safe with us. — Michael Marshall Smith

When you're a child the world forbears you, allows you your flights of imagination, your feelings of specialness. But sooner or later the privileges are withdrawn, and all you're left with is a stunned bitterness at the realisation that you're just the same as everybody else. — Michael Marshall Smith

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. — Michael Marshall Smith

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. — Michael Marshall Smith

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. — Michael Marshall Smith

The kind of woman who would breeze into the bathroom while I was shaving and say, Yo, shithead - you going to fix that shelf like you said, or do I have to take you back to Husbands-R-Us? — Michael Marshall Smith

You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in the breeze, when you were two years old; the most exciting film is just the way everything was, back in the days when you stared goggle-eyed at the whirling chaos all around you. All these things do is get the adult to shut up for a while, to open for just a moment a tiny sliding window in the cell deep inside, letting the pallid child peep hungrily out and drink the world in before darkness falls again. — Michael Marshall Smith

I shut my eyes, turned away for a moment, and it came: a shiver of finality like the one when you decide, in your own mind, that you're going to have to tell someone who loves you that you don't want to be with them anymore. Terror, and relief; relief and terror, so intermingled that they feel like the same thought. — Michael Marshall Smith

we all inhabit the same place during the day, at night each one of us is hurled into a several world. Well, — Michael Marshall Smith

Being me is not a fate everyone would enjoy. There are risks, and frequent disappointments. I'm not all that keen on the arrangement myself, to be honest. — Michael Marshall Smith

He couldn't make the thought go anywhere, and soon zoned out into watching the television screen. It showed a crazy-haired old gent tramping around an undistinguished patch of countryside. He couldn't remember selecting the channel, and with the sound off it really wasn't very interesting. Was it worth turning the sound up? Probably not. It increasingly seemed to him that television was being created for someone else. He was welcome to watch it, of course, but it was not he whom the creators had in mind.
("Maybe Next Time") — Michael Marshall Smith

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. — Michael Marshall Smith

Are you okay?' 'What do you mean?' 'You stopped talking. Just sat there looking intense.' 'Sorry. I had a stretch of interior monologue. Slightly lyrical. Takes a while to get through. — Michael Marshall Smith

I once met a woman who'd been in therapy ... and it seemed like the big thing she'd learned was to ignore everything she thought in the first hour of the day. That's when the negative stuff will try to bring you down, she said, and she was right about that but not much else. You come back from the night with your head and your soul empty, and bad things try to fill you up. There's a lot to get exercised about, if you let it. But if you've got a task, something to fill your head and move your limbs, by the time you've finished it the day has begun ands you're onto the next thing. You're over the hump, like I said. — Michael Marshall Smith

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. — Michael Marshall Smith

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. — Michael Marshall Smith

Is she dead?" called Zenda.
Sort of," I shouted, "And the pizza's completely fucked too. — Michael Marshall Smith

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

People always find it so frustrating that there's no structure they can see, that they just have to follow the river downstream and see what they find. They want to know the plot so they can guess the end, because they're afraid of what it might be. I can understand that, even though I know it's not the way things work. I never know what the hell's going to happen next, but I can live with that. — Michael Marshall Smith

Some stories, some people, deserve their length and span. They merit a novel-length treatment, have things to tell and other lives to illuminate. — Michael Marshall Smith

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. — Michael Marshall Smith

I caught one last glimpse of her face, howling something at me.
There were too many vowels in what she said, and they were in an unkind order. ("Substitutions") — Michael Marshall Smith

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. — Michael Marshall Smith

I work in my study, taking the collections of words that people send me and making small adjustments to them, changing something here and there, checking everything is in order and putting a part of myself into the text by introducing just a little bit of difference. ("Substitutions") — Michael Marshall Smith

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. — Michael Marshall Smith

I said this was his story. I didn't say I believed it. I don't. You shouldn't either. That would be best. — Michael Marshall Smith

There are times when life seems like a struggle where the only reward you get for hanging on is the chance to struggle some more. — Michael Marshall Smith

I cannot remember when I became exhausted instead of merely tired. — Michael Marshall Smith

You still search for Narnia, even though by then you're too old to believe in it and it doesn't want you there. — Michael Marshall Smith

I realised suddenly that I was thirty-four and not making a very good job of it. — Michael Marshall Smith

What they are is a small tablet about six inches square, which has a screen in it. As you walk it shows a scrolling digital map of the area you're in, telling you what each store you pass sells, who lives in what block, the whole works, updated by small beacons on every street corner. If you tap in a destination the screen shows you a red line to follow, and the tablet whispers at you to tell you when to make a turn. — Michael Marshall Smith

Growing older, it appears, does not mean growing up. — Michael Marshall Smith

When you let it get personal, the cost becomes personal too. You're opening your own heart here. You sure you want to do that?"

"I'd do it for free. For the bullshit you are, and have always been."

"Disbelief is easy, Kane. It's faith that takes courage, and character. — Michael Marshall Smith

When you're born a light is switched on, a light which shines up through your life. As you get older the light still reaches you, sparkling as it comes up through your memories. And if you're lucky as you travel forward through time, you'll bring the whole of yourself along with you, gathering your skirts and leaving nothing behind, nothing to obscure the light. But if a Bad Thing happens part of you is seared into place, and trapped for ever at that time. The rest of you moves onward, dealing with all the todays and tomorrows, but something, some part of you, is left behind. That part blocks the light, colours the rest of your life, but worse than that, it's alive. Trapped for ever at that moment, and alone in the dark, that part of you is still alive. — Michael Marshall Smith

I guess, like some guy once said, if triangles invented a god, the chances are high it would have three sides. — Michael Marshall Smith

The angel we named God banned representations of himself, even the writing of his name, trying to halt the process of literalization - but in the end it became inevitable. The angel found himself at the head of a corporation, run by Young Turks who wouldn't respect the line management structure: They rewrote his memos to make the law more rigorous, more confined, more human. He got ousted in a boardroom coup and kicked upstairs. He hadn't realized the power of corporeality, that the minds of men would of necessity alter the mind of their God. Being a deity meant taking on a lot of your subjects' qualities - both profound and trivial. — Michael Marshall Smith

One of the most subtle and powerful writers of dark fiction - a unique voice. — Michael Marshall Smith

Everything you do is a one-way street. — Michael Marshall Smith

I hurtled down a path through the middle of a park, past shrubbery so refined it was probably entitled to vote. — Michael Marshall Smith