Zitat des Tages von Martin Cruz Smith:
The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself.
I feel very bad about getting things wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd always been a great fan of George Orwell.
I've always been struck by how unsuspicious people are in general, if you tell them what you're about.
I hate to be categorized.
I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.
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.
The fact is that I loved being in England.
I never thought I would just be doing Arkady books.
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.
As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.