Quotes from Michael Marshall Smith

The future is hungry and unkind. It'll gobble you up, little girl. It will eat your heart.

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

Almost every story in the world has a back door through which the Devil can enter if he so chooses.

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

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

I have a way of dealing with temptation. I just succumb and get it over with.

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.

Imagine, if you will, a watchmaker's workshop. In fact, please imagine one whether you wish to or not.

There is no beginning. We are always in the middle.

I cannot remember when I became exhausted instead of merely tired.

The telephone, though a remarkable device, is not designed for real communication, for the heavy lifting of personal interaction. For the big stuff, you have to be in the same physical space. Questions are asked and answered on a chemical level: Our species lived and loved and dealt with each other for millions of years before we developed language. It's still only ever background music.

When you don't know what you want you clutch at everything, thinking that because it's new it will be better, and not realising that a nobody won't be happy with anything.

I was a circumstance, Hannah, that's all. Good or bad - and I assure you that I remain extremely and appallingly bad - there are many angels because there were once many gods, pushing, pulling, hiding, guiding. Once we get through the fog and find a place that feels comfortable we look back and call their influence fate, and the destination our destiny. That's all.

Well. it's all been extremely interesting,' Hannah declared, standing to leave. 'But if I'm honest, I'd prefer my life to be a lot more mundane from now on.

Ignorance isn't always bliss. Sometimes it's just a huge pain in the arse

It is the aimless who find the wrong roads, and drive down them, simply because they have nowhere else to go.

Growing older, it appears, does not mean growing up.

If a door isn't there then you can't hope to go through it, but if it's there but always locked, then you're trapped. Someone is keeping the door shut.

It's not true that everyone wants to confess a crime, but most people do want to tell something of their story, to stop hiding for just a while.

Humans and stories need each other.

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.

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

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.

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.