Martin Cruz Smith Quotes

When I was in college, being a magician was not the classiest thing to be. It was like being a folk singer before Bob Dylan.

Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved.

I think who you are in school really sticks with you. I don't ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It's like, 'Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here.'

No-one has ever called me a cool dude. I'm somewhere between geek and normal.

I remember just sitting down one day and going, 'I should have friends.' And then I developed a sense of humour. By the end of high school, I would say I was the most popular girl.

Girls started noticing me a little bit more in senior year, and junior year, and that was weird.

I'm basically a professional nerd, and I'm still not cool. I'm around people who are cool sometimes, and I know I'm not them. But that's OK; I don't care.

I suppose what happened is that I spent my whole life wanting to be cool but eventually came to recognise the mechanism of how coolness works. So it's not really that I don't want to be cool anymore - it's more like I've come to realise that coolness doesn't exist the way I once assumed.

You can't get along in society without an identity.

I didn't know what a boy was until I was about 18. I wasn't in the cool group at all. We weren't cool, but we weren't nerdy enough to be picked on. So we were just in our own little bubble.

I wasn't the cool kid in school, but I wasn't the lame one. I knew I wasn't cool, so I called myself lame, and that's what made me cool in front of the cool kids.

What I'm trying to do is maintain some mindfulness about being popular - I wasn't so great at that last time around.

I was never cool as a kid.

The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.

Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid?

I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever.

In the United States, if you ask teachers, "Are there children whom we should call 'gifted?'", many if not most will say 'No.' That's the politically correct answer. But if you then ask the teacher to rank order students in terms of how well they paint or write or dance, they'll have little difficulty in doing so.

I don't know anything about anything. The only difference between then and now is this: I may know more than I used to but my wisdom pales in comparison to that which I have yet to learn

I was called a terrorist yesterday... Today I am admired by the very people who said I was one.

I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).

There's not even real *popularity* at my school." "That," Coli said emphatically, "is a sentence that has only ever been spoken by popular people.

Now I'm a God, but tomorrow, when you have to stop me from playing with dead things again, you'll be right back to calling me an idiot, won't you?

...people will go for anything they don't understand if it's got enough hype. They want to be hip, want always to be in on the new thing so they don't look unhip. White people are especially like that, particularly when a black person is doing something they don't understand...That's what I thought was happening when Ornette hit town.

the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.

I think it's important never to look a gift horse in the mouth, never to overlook your talents [and] what you're good at.