Top 40 Marcus Sakey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You want to change the world? Forget politics. Learn to code.”

— Marcus Sakey

2. “I’m always geeking out about something.”

— Marcus Sakey

3. “The world would be a better place if people stopped voting for folksy candidates they could have a beer with and started voting for people smarter than they are.”

— Marcus Sakey

4. “Once I came to really understand the mechanics of three-act structure, my life got a great deal easier. It doesn’t tell you how to write your book, but it helps you understand why things aren’t working, or what kind of beat needs to come next.”

— Marcus Sakey

5. “A city of unarmed dreamers huddling beneath angry skies.”

— Marcus Sakey

6. “Stephen King is open about the fact that he continues to learn the craft, and if King hasn’t got it figured out yet, what the hell hope have the rest of us got?”

— Marcus Sakey

7. “Maybe the world would burn. But if truth was all it took to start the fire, maybe it needed to.”

— Marcus Sakey

8. “Personally, one of the most helpful things I learned was three-act structure. For my first four or so novels, I built the structure intuitively.”

— Marcus Sakey

9. “Maybe that’s what love is. Believing in the best version of your partner, so they have the courage to believe it themselves.”

— Marcus Sakey

10. “No matter how long you spend at creation, you’re always a student.”

— Marcus Sakey

11. “That was the thing about terror: it made rational people act irrationally. From a certain perspective, the fear was more destructive than the actual killing.”

— Marcus Sakey

12. “For a moment, the future threatened to swamp him, the terrifying infinity of it, like being alone in the Pacific in the middle of a starless night, all that water and time around and below him, the deepest hole in the planet sucking him down into darkness.”

— Marcus Sakey

13. “First they came for the revolutionaries, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a revolutionary. Then they came for the intellectuals, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t an intellectual. Then they came for the tier ones, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a tier one. Then they came for the brilliants, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a brilliant. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”

— Marcus Sakey

14. “Mom and Dad chatting around mouthfuls of steak while Junior used the scraps of his hamburger to buttress the walls of Fort French Fry.”

— Marcus Sakey

15. “We are never more clever than in the creation of ways to destroy ourselves.”

— Marcus Sakey

16. “That was the lure of wealth, he’d discovered: a throaty whisper in your ear that you were special, that it was all – this wine, this woman, this world – for you. That it in some way existed only so that you might partake of it.”

— Marcus Sakey

17. “The problem with the best moment in your life is that every other moment is worse.”

— Marcus Sakey

18. “Around here, I’m pretty sure ‘us’ means Texans, and ‘them’ means the other seven billion on the planet.”

— Marcus Sakey

19. “Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity.”

— Marcus Sakey

20. “And difference, as he learned that day, inspired a particular kind of savagery.”

— Marcus Sakey

21. “She’d always been blunt, to the point that people sometimes mistook her for cold. In truth, she was one of the warmest people he had ever met. It was just that she had the honesty of someone with nothing to prove.”

— Marcus Sakey

22. “Be nothing. Be not the spider nor the man nor the future nor the past. Be the moment. Be nothing.”

— Marcus Sakey

23. “No matter how smoothly you tossed a stone into water, there were always ripples. Alongside.”

— Marcus Sakey

24. “But how do you teach a child to grasp that complexity? You teach them to grasp the style of thinking. There are no answers, only questions that shape your understanding, and which in turn reveal more questions.”

— Marcus Sakey

25. “But not a flag worshipper. He cared about the principles, not the symbol.” “That’s what patriotism means. The others are just fetishists.”

— Marcus Sakey

26. “Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity. Being an engineer or an architect had once been high aspirations. Now everybody wanted to be musicians and basketball players, and America didn’t build squat.”

— Marcus Sakey

27. “Hollywood is a deeply odd place. There are so many factors that have to go perfectly, so many schedules and visions that have to snap together for a film even to be made, much less be good.”

— Marcus Sakey

28. “Perhaps the truth was that Hell wasn’t a physical location; it was an idea that could be summoned into being. Hell had been created countless times before, from the Crusaders’ massacre of Jerusalem to Stalin’s “hunger-extermination” of seven million Ukrainians; from reeking, disease-ridden slave ships bound for New Orleans to the systemized horror of Auschwitz; from Lieutenant Calley to the Khmer Rouge. There was almost an equation to it. Hell was born when some decided others weren’t people.”

— Marcus Sakey

29. “Possible ID, leather jacket.” In his ear, the team confirmed the sighting. On the bench, Luisa set down her salad and put a hand on her purse. Vasquez turned to face the guy, his eyes a question. The man in the leather jacket slipped his hand into his right front pocket.”

— Marcus Sakey

30. “No, the great thing about the truth is that it’s true.”

— Marcus Sakey

31. “Cooper had been at a scene once where a car had collided with an agent and pinned him against a metal barrier, shattering everything from the ribs down, severing both legs at midthigh. Massive physical damage, unsurvivable. What had haunted him most, though, was that the man was calm. He didn’t scream, didn’t seem to feel any pain. Some wounds were too enormous to feel.”

— Marcus Sakey

32. “Because artists are more dangerous than murderers. The most prolific serial killer might have dozens of victims, but poets can lay low entire generations.”

— Marcus Sakey

33. “It was like meeting someone exceptional while you were married: the yank of possibility, the realization that here was another path your life could have taken.”

— Marcus Sakey

34. “Cold liquid splashing across his face brought Kevin Temple back to himself. He’d been on the road all night, a dedicated run from Indiana hauling a load of fresh vegetables. Fifteen minutes out of the depot in Cleveland, and he had that stale feel, too much coffee washing down too much beef jerky. What he’d really been craving was a double cheeseburger, but while it would surprise no one to see a trucker gone flabby around.”

— Marcus Sakey

35. “Cooper said nothing. “Jesus.” Quinn rubbed at his eyes. “Wait. How does this get him what he wants? Things are worse now for abnorms than ever before. The microchipping, the hate crimes, hell, every third congressman holding press conferences to say we need to lock you all up.”

— Marcus Sakey

36. “She’d always been blunt, to the point that people sometimes mistook her for cold. In truth, she was one of the warmest people he had ever met.”

— Marcus Sakey

37. “Frightened people want action more than they want correct action. It’s in the data.”

— Marcus Sakey

38. “He had been someone before. That person had been the result of a lifetime of choices, good and bad. And like it or not, he was drawing closer to that identity now. Not the freedom of infinite variety, but the tyranny of a decision made, a path walked, a life lived. What if he didn’t like the view.”

— Marcus Sakey

39. “I didn’t want to just write a series – I wanted to write an epic, on story that spans three books, where decisions made in the first impact the last.”

— Marcus Sakey

40. “The last twelve hours had been tense, everyone seeing the Mexican border looming large, and beyond it, the wide world into which someone like Vasquez could vanish. But with each move the abnorm made, Cooper got better at predicting the next. Like peeling away layers of tissue paper to reveal the object beneath, a vague form began to resolve into the pattern that defined his target.”

— Marcus Sakey