Top 100 Nick Harkaway Quotes
#1. Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it.
Nick Harkaway
#2. I mean that the escape of knowledge into the realm of wider society irretrievably alters the nature of our lives.
Nick Harkaway
#3. Deserts are like nearly bald men having a haircut. The difference is absolutely crucial from within, but to the rest of us it's still a dusty scrubland with little in the way of plant life.
Nick Harkaway
#4. The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means.
Nick Harkaway
#5. If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.
Nick Harkaway
#6. Never mind, never mind, let's get to the part where we smite the unrighteous. I've brought my most alarming teeth!
Nick Harkaway
#7. Prize lists are out, and you're not on them? Nature of the world - means nothing. Prizes are a lottery.
Nick Harkaway
#8. In a novel, even if you put a country in the wrong hemisphere, which I've done, I can always claim it was part of the additional weirdness of the story.
Nick Harkaway
#9. He wore his medals. He had a surprising number of them, the real kind, not the ones you got for turning up. Although turning up was no mean thing, some days.
Nick Harkaway
#10. We need to differentiate between commercial piracy - where criminal organisations produce illicit DVDs on a huge scale - and domestic, unauthorised filesharing, which may or may not be detrimental to overall sales.
Nick Harkaway
#11. My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler.
Nick Harkaway
#12. The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us.
Nick Harkaway
#13. A lot of author events are basically hour-long classes in entropy perched on bad seating under bright, hard lights, with - if you're lucky - bad Chardonnay and cheese on a stick waiting for you at the end of the ride.
Nick Harkaway
#14. Real life has no understanding of proper structure," the boy said, "which is why news stories are always made of little lies.
Nick Harkaway
#15. He'd never prove it, and if he did there'd be nothing he could do about it. But it would be true, and that was something.
Nick Harkaway
#16. The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.
Nick Harkaway
#17. A cherry pie is ... ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life.
Nick Harkaway
#18. Soot and sorrow: the Night Market's invocation of desperate seriousness, of doom and disaster.
Nick Harkaway
#19. Lights burn on the upper floors, traders and analysts letting commerce take precedence over family one more time in a desperate attempt to add to a Christmas bonus they won't have time to spend.
Nick Harkaway
#20. Cheese is good. And Britain, despite the grumblings of the French and the outrage of the Swiss, not to mention some plucky challenges from Italy, Austria, and Spain, has some of the best cheese in the world. We're world leaders in cheese.
Nick Harkaway
#21. You've picked up a rummy habit," James Banister said cordially as they approached one another. "Sort of a crouch. You look a bit ... well, I'm sorry, but you look a bit Victor Hugo, if you catch my drift. Would you like to adjourn to a cathedral or something?
Nick Harkaway
#22. An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it.
Nick Harkaway
#23. There is not now, nor I suspect will there ever be, a le Carre novel with ninjas in it. Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That's a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few.
Nick Harkaway
#24. The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible.
Nick Harkaway
#25. Digital books are still painfully ugly and weirdly irritating to interact with. They look like copies of paper, but they can't be designed or typeset in the same way as paper, and however splendid the cover images may look on a hi-res screen, they're still images rather than physical things.
Nick Harkaway
#26. I wanted a pseudonym partly because I'm quite shy and private. I know that sounds ludicrous, but if I should be lucky enough to make a hit, I wanted to be able to shrug off the mantel of Nick Harkaway when I got home.
Nick Harkaway
#27. I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired.
Nick Harkaway
#28. The Internet has the capacity to extend to us genuine choice, and that is not without risk. Real power does entail real responsibility.
Nick Harkaway
#29. Annabelle growls tunelessly, like a bear hibernating on a bassoonist.
Nick Harkaway
#30. The important thing is that if I can get to it and get back out again without being spotted, it will be a useful study aid in my newly chosen specialist field of getting-the-fuck-out-of-here-ology.
Nick Harkaway
#31. 'Gone-Away World' was a shotgun blast, an explosion out of the box I'd put myself into writing film scripts. 'Tigerman' is shorter, tighter, more crafted.
Nick Harkaway
#32. The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life.
Nick Harkaway
#33. Joe is never sure whether they're mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.
Nick Harkaway
#34. It's a Shit Creek tsunami, is what it is. Paddles are no longer the issue.
Nick Harkaway
#35. When your friend is decomposing, surely you owe it to them to inhale their death. To do otherwise seems impossible prim.
Nick Harkaway
#36. I'm a novelist: I spend a great part of my day pretending to myself that I'm in a different world, being a different person, faced with decisions I pretend I haven't created.
Nick Harkaway
#37. I'm not shy, exactly, but I am private. I don't like to talk about myself. I had to learn - I was interviewed for print, radio and even TV.
Nick Harkaway
#38. Names aren't just coathooks, they're coats. They're the first thing anyone knows about you.
Nick Harkaway
#39. I studied revolutions at university, and I think each revolution must begin with a moment of 'no.' If enough people have that moment at the same time, it becomes a movement.
Nick Harkaway
#40. Her eyes are very bright. She loves senses, loves the world. He finds that ... admirable, and a bit daunting. I am a mole. I am hiding, in the company of a woman who adores the sunlight and the rain.
Nick Harkaway
#41. Nowhere have I ever heard of Satan taking the form of an avuncular hippie. No doubt he could. It just seems inefficient.
Nick Harkaway
#42. My scientific qualifications are relatively scant. I like science. I try really hard to educate myself about it, but in the end, if something has to go 'boom,' and it would probably only go 'fwoosh,' I am relatively unconcerned about that, which is a sin, but not, I think, a grave one.
Nick Harkaway
#43. I read my father's books growing up. I thought then and I still think now that his writing is wonderful. It delights and infuriates me in equal measure that he's still that good.
Nick Harkaway
#45. Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.
Nick Harkaway
#46. That's probably why she has added the two severed heads to the uprights of the throne. They lend her an undeniable air of not screwing around.
Nick Harkaway
#47. I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes.
Nick Harkaway
#48. We have a curious relationship with 'funny' in the U.K. We love to laugh, but we also think that making people laugh is just a little bit second-tier, especially in a literary context.
Nick Harkaway
#49. Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate.
Nick Harkaway
#50. Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.
Nick Harkaway
#51. Edie Banister, wearing a false moustache which tastes of tiger flank and erotic dancer, sitting six storeys up on the windowsill of the aged mother of a renownedly murderous prince, takes a few seconds to contemplate the unusual direction of her life.
Nick Harkaway
#52. He concluded that governments were like wars: the reasons and the forces might change, but it was still the same dying over the same soil.
Nick Harkaway
#53. I think lots of boys sat down with 'The Three Musketeers' and felt it was a really long book, but then discovered that it's a really gripping swashbuckling story.
Nick Harkaway
#54. Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.
Nick Harkaway
#55. Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature.
Nick Harkaway
#56. It was made and designed by the House of Awesome, from materials found in the deep awesome mines of Awesometania and it would be recorded in the Annals of Awesome.
Nick Harkaway
#57. Faith has always struck him as either a tremendous gift or an appalling deception, depending on whether there's a God or not.
Nick Harkaway
#58. It's true that interacting through text means no eyelines, no facial expressions, no tone of voice. That can be an advantage, helping us to consider content rather than eloquence, import rather than source.
Nick Harkaway
#59. You need to relax and be yourself, not whoever it is you're trying to be in your mad little head. I bloody don't, though. I'm me and I'm good at it.
Nick Harkaway
#61. In both 'Tigerman' and my first book, 'The Gone-Away World,' there are characters who never really get names. They're too fundamentally who they are to be bound by a name, so I couldn't give them one.
Nick Harkaway
#62. I have wrangles with Facebook, entered fictitious trips because I can't get the map to get off my page, don't want people to know where I live. It is possible to carve out a space that's your own.
Nick Harkaway
#63. Nature intended in her design a hearty life of toil, open fires and plump old age attended by a brood of sun-touched brats.
Nick Harkaway
#64. He lounged and exhaled, and felt some small part of himself relax, like the moment when the elastic band on a child's toy plane, wound and wound until the twisting redoubles upon itself and then let go to power the propeller, spasms once and releases that second layer of knots. He
Nick Harkaway
#65. I thought about my personal version of heaven, which is small and calm and features only one angel, who cannot sing.
Nick Harkaway
#66. Joshua Joseph has no great hatred of modern technology
he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine.
Nick Harkaway
#67. In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down.
Nick Harkaway
#68. My wife runs the charity Reprieve, and so rendition, droning, and capital punishment are very much the topics of our dinner table because of that.
Nick Harkaway
#69. Destiny' is the state of perfect mechanical causation in which everything is the consequence of everything else. If choice is an illusion, what's life? Consciousness without volition. We'd all be passengers, no more real than model trains.
Nick Harkaway
#70. No. The moral of the story in so far as it has one is that cannibals can study logic, and that if you are going to leave the path, you better have your wits about you and know better than to trust the first scary old lady who talks to you in public.
Nick Harkaway
#71. Bones were not strong just because they were the strongest thing a human body had.
Nick Harkaway
#72. All my characters are me, in one way or another.
Nick Harkaway
#73. It's not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic, it's that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is.
Nick Harkaway
#74. He wondered if he should try to talk to the boy like that. Perhaps the boy wondered why he didn't. But they had silence, and not many people had that.
Nick Harkaway
#76. To my irritation, you still can't flick through an ebook properly; you can't riffle the pages, you can't look at more than one page at once.
Nick Harkaway
#77. He seems an unlikely companion for a woman like Edie Banister, but the world, Daniel once observed, is a great honeycombed thing composed of separated mysteries.
Nick Harkaway
#78. There's a saying in the movie industry that if your movie is about what you actually think it's about, you're in big trouble. I think it's the same with books.
Nick Harkaway
#79. I want a politics that doesn't need to pretend to be holy or perfect or infallible. I want a politics that gets on with it.
Nick Harkaway
#80. I'm an irredeemable urbanite. I can't imagine living more than a five-minute walk from my fellow human beings. Other people are vital to my peace of mind.
Nick Harkaway
#81. The market, as we're all painfully aware in the aftermath of the banking crisis, can be an idiot. It has no perception of right or wrong, or even sensible or insane. It sees profit.
Nick Harkaway
#82. My reading of history is that we continually inherit trouble.
Nick Harkaway
#83. I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried.
Nick Harkaway
#85. We don't need to chase a nostalgic rendering of Britain as it never was and never can be: we need instead an understanding of who we really are and what a happy, prosperous, just nation might look like.
Nick Harkaway
#86. Because for Gonzo, anything which may explode at any moment is clearly a girl.
Nick Harkaway
#87. They seemed to believe that the right mixture of Nike, granola and hard work would turn anyone, anywhere in the world, into a millionaire.
Nick Harkaway
#88. Victorian theorists competed to identify how many biologically differentiated races lived on Earth and proposed inherent characteristics for them, formulated explanations for these presumed variations in humanity.
Nick Harkaway
#89. The game is fixed. Alwayas has been, always will be, and the only way out for a man is the gangster's road.
Nick Harkaway
#90. I am an avid reader of comics, though I came to them late.
Nick Harkaway
#91. I do not propose that everyone in Guantanamo or its evil twin at Bagram is innocent. I just don't believe we should incarcerate people without trial and torture them or facilitate and profit from their torture.
Nick Harkaway
#92. In a lot of places, of course, the '80s had never really come to an end.
Nick Harkaway
#94. The reason steampunk attracts people is that it is premised on a technology which is visible and pleasing to the naked eye, and whose moving parts are comprehensible on a human scale.
Nick Harkaway
#95. An important part of the Internet is that it provides a space for people whose identities are socially unacceptable. If it enables someone who feels minoritised to be who they want to be, it's actually worth having other people be offensive. I'd much rather have both than have neither.
Nick Harkaway
#96. Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing.
Nick Harkaway
#97. You must come, Lester," Inoue had said. "You must come! We will cry for this place, but also we will dance the Funky Chicken.
Nick Harkaway
#98. 'Tigerman' was born in the front seat of a Hilux SUV on the road north out of Chiang Mai.
Nick Harkaway
#99. We need to create the institutions that will support the society we want to live in. The only answer is collective action.
Nick Harkaway
#100. Being a parent is weird. It changes people in subtle and unsubtle ways. In my case, it awoke a kind of manic sentinel in my brain. Anything in the house that might be a threat to the kids or to my wife gets terminated - food, sharp edges, poor wiring.
Nick Harkaway
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