Top 31 Quotes & Sayings by Martin Cruz Smith

The government is shutting down the coal industry, they say it's cheaper to draw nuclear power off the French grid and cheaper to buy coal from Colombia.

I'm very aware when I'm speaking to the English of how flat my Mid-Atlantic American voice is.

Then years back, when I moved to California, I happened to see a book about fashions of 19th-century Victorian England, only four pages of which was devoted to the dress of the working class.

As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.

I've always been struck by how unsuspicious people are in general, if you tell them what you're about.

Most people - and particularly people whose lives have nothing to do with books at all - are intrigued by the idea that somebody wants to listen to them and get it right.

'High Concept' means a book or a film whose core idea can be stated in a single sentence, such as 'Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito are twins.' Or, 'Arnold is pregnant.'

Julian Assange is certainly no hero. The man behind WikiLeaks issued threats as if he were Dr. No bent on ending civilization as we know it. We will find him, lock him up, and throw away the key. But give the man credit; for a week the truth was laid bare.

I hate to be categorized.

I feel very bad about getting things wrong.

I have another Russian idea, too, with a place and a period, so I guess I have enough to keep me busy for quite some time, especially considering that I'm such a slow writer.

What's wonderful is to read the different translations - some done in 1600 and some in 1900 - of the same passage. It's fascinating to watch the same tale repeated in such a different way by two different centuries.

I never thought I would just be doing Arkady books.

Of course the biggest mafia in Russia has always been the government; in Soviet times, the Communist Party, and now a circle of former KGB and FSB.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City, as they call it - London, the people of the south.

I'd always been a great fan of George Orwell.

The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself.

The fact is that I loved being in England.

Then there was the whole concept of coal mining, which is a culture unto itself, the most dangerous occupation in the world, and which draws and develops a certain kind of man.

Mystery books. I must read a hundred a year. . . I just wish some of them were harder to figure out.

You have to be an outsider to write.

The research is the most interesting part… That’s how I work. I go some place and I walk it and I talk to people until I find what I’ve come for. Or not. Fortunately, I tend to find what I’m after.

High Concept means a book or a film whose core idea can be stated in a single sentence, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito are twins. Or, Arnold is pregnant.

It was like passing the scene of a highway accident and being relieved to learn that nobody had been seriously injured.

Because normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history.

Kali is the goddess of destruction, the Clawed Hands, the Blood Drinker... And that's one side of her, as it is for any god. If you knew her for thousands of years you'd know she could be all colors. The sky is black at night, but if your eyes were good enough, they could see the different lights of a million stars. Death is part of her because death is part of life.

I used to be treated like an idiot, now I'm treated like an idiot savant.

Happiness is the maximum agreement of reality and desire.

To capture the human cost of fallen empire with all its horror and absurdity, Sheets offers the right combination: the political insight of a top reporter and the power of a novelist.

The most beautiful women in the world were African.