Top 40 Michael Marshall Smith Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “Welcome to adulthood. Please leave your dreams at the door.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

4. “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

5. “You have to accept gifts occasionally, because there are some things you can’t give yourself.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

6. “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

7. “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.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

8. “Hell is being alive, and being alive is all there is.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

9. “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.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

10. “Death is real. Death changes things. Everything else is filler, merely a message from our sponsor.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

11. “I guess, like some guy once said, if triangles invented a god, the chances are high it would have three sides.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

12. “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

13. “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.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

14. “You haven’t seen untidiness until you’ve seen a room where gravity has failed twice in different directions.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

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

— Michael Marshall Smith

16. “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.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

17. “She lost her fury. He’d had none. That’s how you win, in the end.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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?”

— Michael Marshall Smith

21. “But digging up the roots of chaos is like saying it’s not the moment the car hits you that’s important, or the split second when you step off the curb without looking. You can argue that as soon as you stopped checking when you crossed the street, that’s when the trouble really began. The moment of impact is what you remember, however. That breathless instant of screech and thud, the second when the car hits and all other futures are canceled.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

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

— Michael Marshall Smith

23. “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

24. “Humans and stories need each other. We tell them, but they tell us too – reaching with soft hands and wide arms to pull us into their embrace. They do this especially when we have become mired in lives of which we can make no sense. We all need a path, and stories can sometimes usher us back to it.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

25. “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

26. “Storyboarded by the West Coast’s finest, the ceiling celebrated the exploits of that most durable of action heroes – God.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

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

— Michael Marshall Smith

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

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

— Michael Marshall Smith

35. “Your story can change. Overnight.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

36. “And so later Hannah was back at the kitchen table in her house. Sitting where she’d sat earlier. Her place. Hannah didn’t know that humankind has a deep-set belief in the idea that we create and maintain reality through ritual, that repeated actions are what keep the spheres in alignment. She also didn’t know that it doesn’t work, and that there are far older, more complex, and much darker designs in motion, ones that override ours as effortlessly as a crack of thunder blotting out birdsong.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

37. “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

38. “I realised suddenly that I was thirty-four and not making a very good job of it.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

39. “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

40. “Never ask questions if you might not want to know the answers, lest you are pulled into those stories and the truths they reveal. Sometimes ignorance is better. It would probably not be so popular otherwise.”

— Michael Marshall Smith

41. “Disbelief is easy, Kane. It’s faith that takes courage, and character.”

— Michael Marshall Smith