Martin Cruz Smith

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

“I hate to be categorized.”

“I never thought I would just be doing Arkady books.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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'd always been a great fan of George Orwell.”

“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.”

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

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

“Wolves eat dogs." That did seem to be the consensus of the village, Arkady thought. Roman shook his head as if he'd given the matter a lot of consideration. "Wolves hate dogs. Wolves hunt down dogs because they regard them as traitors. If you think about it, dogs are dogs only because of humans; otherwise they'd all be wolves, right? And where will we be when all the dogs are gone? It will be the end of civilization.”

“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.”

“I feel very bad about getting things wrong.”

“'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.'”

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

“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.”

“The fact is that I loved being in England.”

“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.”

“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.”