Michael Marshall Smith

"Hotels see a lot of life. Hotels get kicked around. The action the average city hotel sees would give a normal house a nervous breakdown in a day. In the small hours the building has some time to itse…"

"It had taken me a while to work out what I got from this. You didn't watch in the hope of seeing something exciting. Just the opposite. You watched because the very lack of discernible activity, of pr…"

"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…"

"Hell is being alive, and being alive is all there is."

"Must be a strange life these days, for toes. A simple twist of fate and they could have been the big boys, the much-feted opposables, spending their days busy carrying things and controlling machinery…"

"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 g…"

"The curse of the middle-aged man was knowing — or believing — that he'd told all he had to tell. Soon as you suspect that, you started wanting something, anything, to prove it wasn't so: and that's wh…"

"The United States is different because I've spent a lot of time there since, and so there's more of a continuum. It's definitely the U.S. that has the deepest roots in my soul. I spent my childhood be…"