Quotes from 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.

The more you get to know someone, the more there is to dislike. If you get to know them well enough, you hate them.

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.

Everything you do is a one-way street.

The furniture was white and the carpet red – it looked like the inside of someone's mouth. Three

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.

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?

There is an intimacy to carrying someone else's blood on your hands, in seeing their eyes as they realize the sharp and finite limit to how much more of the world they themselves will see.

Make the most of it, kiddo, she found herself thinking. A nightmare is just a nightmare. You don't know anything about real sadness yet.

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

But how could I bring it up? I'd actually be asking something else, and I wasn't sure I was ready to open that box. Even if it turned out to be empty, it would never be properly reclosed. Utterance is a one-way street. Questions can never be unasked.

though we all inhabit the same place during the day, at night each one of us is hurled into a several world.

Wherever you go, and whatever you do, the first thing you're going to see in the morning, and the last thing at night, is the inside of your own head. An unchanging landscape, a still photograph.

And sometimes, when a lot has happened in your life, much of it inexplicable, silence is what you need to say the most.

would be on top of me like a ton of heavy things.

Power that affects nothing is mere vanity.

One of life's dreariest truths, my dear, is that something once wonderful can come to seem … ordinary.

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

What?' 'Wherever there are good people,' he said, 'there are also bad. The world is heavy. If it doesn't want to follow where you're leading, then in the end the dream will die. What replaces a dream is often thin and dry for a time. People do not show their best sides in such circumstances.

You can never go back, only forward. I read that in a book once.

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.

The light of life shines up from your birth, and I'd left so much in the way that I had stood for years in twilight, isolated and alone while the person I'd once been still stamped and raved, blocking the light and poisoning the sun.

In the story, an old man tells his grandson that he has a fight going on inside him, and has done his whole life. Between two wolves. One is a bad wolf – a wolf consumed with anger, regret, resentment and sorrow. The other wolf is good, with a heart filled with kindness, compassion and hope. Even joy. The boy asks which wolf will win in the end. The old man looks at him very seriously and says: "The one you feed.

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