Top 100 Harkaway Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.
Nick Harkaway
#3. To recap: it is possible to put decent information into a Government Machine, have ordinary, good people running the thing, and a reasonable system in place, and still get utter idiocy out of the dispenser?"
"More than possible. Likely.
Nick Harkaway
#5. 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
#6. Whether you're choosing for yourself or for a character - or for a child - names have baggage of their own.
Nick Harkaway
#7. Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other.
Nick Harkaway
#8. That's what you get for ignoring the beauty of Tupperware.
Nick Harkaway
#9. 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
#10. We should be worrying about if you live in the city you're more likely to have anxiety or mood disorders and to be schizophrenic. More than the problems people have from social media.
Nick Harkaway
#11. As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.
Nick Harkaway
#12. Nowhere have I ever heard of Satan taking the form of an avuncular hippie. No doubt he could. It just seems inefficient.
Nick Harkaway
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Dressing, I chose the second shirt, the one softened in the mouth of a trained and perfumed albino hippopotamus and made entirely of pigeon's wool, because it goes better with the shoes than the one stitched with baby hair.
Nick Harkaway
#16. Names aren't just coathooks, they're coats. They're the first thing anyone knows about you.
Nick Harkaway
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. When your friend is decomposing, surely you owe it to them to inhale their death. To do otherwise seems impossible prim.
Nick Harkaway
#20. It's a Shit Creek tsunami, is what it is. Paddles are no longer the issue.
Nick Harkaway
#21. Steampunk appeals to the idea of uniqueness, to the one-off item, while every mainstream consumer technology of recent years is about putting human beings into ever more granular, packageable and mass-produced identities so that they can be sold or sold to, perfectly mapped and understood.
Nick Harkaway
#22. I'm fascinated by human agency - by the process of decision, both in the individual and the mass.
Nick Harkaway
#23. Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, our financial industry and governments leaned on a snake-oil mirage of wealth creation, a bubble predicated on the obvious falsehood that things could only get better.
Nick Harkaway
#24. Happiness is boundlessly weird. Other people's choices often seem to delight them, where I would run screaming.
Nick Harkaway
#25. I'm usually reading too many books - in fact, I'm usually reading enough books that if the stack fell on me, I'd be injured.
Nick Harkaway
#26. Joe is never sure whether they're mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.
Nick Harkaway
#27. 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
#28. Are you addicted if there is simply no reason for you to do anything else?
Nick Harkaway
#30. 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
#31. 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
#33. 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
#34. Peace is not a state - it is a choice, and you have to remake it every day. It's possible to get a sort of stability, a habit of peace, but it's like an egg balanced, spinning, on its point: lose your momentum, and your equilibrium is gone, too.
Nick Harkaway
#35. 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
#36. Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature.
Nick Harkaway
#37. Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.
Nick Harkaway
#38. 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
#39. She dances in the water. Perhaps that was as good as life got, after all.
Nick Harkaway
#40. The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life.
Nick Harkaway
#41. I know that when I talk to my parents and my friends, there's a strong feeling of the world out of control and damaged.
Nick Harkaway
#42. 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
#43. Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.
Nick Harkaway
#44. Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate.
Nick Harkaway
#45. The Brit abroad is always the voice of caution. Persons of other cultures are known to be undisciplined, prone to leaning out of car windows and cooking with garlic.
Nick Harkaway
#46. We are bodies which think, and we're at home with steampunk because it is an ethos of design and creativity which acknowledges the humanly physical: that which we can understand with our fingers.
Nick Harkaway
#47. 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
#48. I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes.
Nick Harkaway
#49. Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work.
Nick Harkaway
#50. 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
#51. Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.
Nick Harkaway
#52. Photography is without mercy
though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.
Nick Harkaway
#53. Real life has no understanding of proper structure," the boy said, "which is why news stories are always made of little lies.
Nick Harkaway
#54. What will you tell him?"
"The truth."
Fortismer thinks about that.
"Yes," he says at last. "Probably the best thing. Bloody deceptive, honesty.
Nick Harkaway
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler.
Nick Harkaway
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Prize lists are out, and you're not on them? Nature of the world - means nothing. Prizes are a lottery.
Nick Harkaway
#62. This is the world, he thought. And I am in it.
Nick Harkaway
#63. Never mind, never mind, let's get to the part where we smite the unrighteous. I've brought my most alarming teeth!
Nick Harkaway
#64. If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.
Nick Harkaway
#65. 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
#66. Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.
Nick Harkaway
#67. Which knew and understood and did not shy away from the understanding that there would be pain. Which could accept shattering, could reassemble itself, could stand taller than before.
Nick Harkaway
#68. Revolutions come in two stages: the bit where everything gets smashed and the bit where you have to build it again. The first is great fun; the second is so very hard.
Nick Harkaway
#69. I grew up on the Roger Moore and Sean Connery Bond movies, so the DNA of my spies is extremely ridiculous and goofy.
Nick Harkaway
#70. The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.
Nick Harkaway
#71. The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means.
Nick Harkaway
#72. 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
#73. I mean that the escape of knowledge into the realm of wider society irretrievably alters the nature of our lives.
Nick Harkaway
#74. 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
#75. In the aftermath of September 11, you can't - as Tony Blair was so fond of suggesting - draw a line under historical events. They don't go away. They come back.
Nick Harkaway
#76. ... so that any time anyone looked up, expecting out of habit to see Shola, they caught his eye, and shared a moment with him, and the hole in the world was known and acknowledged.
Nick Harkaway
#77. We tend to assume that data is either private or public, either owned by one person or shared by many. In fact there's more to it than that, above and beyond the upsetting reality that private data is now anything but.
Nick Harkaway
#78. In the span of a human lifetime, and well within the collective memory, Britain went from a stable imperial power ruling an appreciable fraction of the Earth's surface to being a tumultuous patchwork which was at least superficially in decline.
Nick Harkaway
#79. '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
#80. 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
#81. Annabelle growls tunelessly, like a bear hibernating on a bassoonist.
Nick Harkaway
#82. 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
#83. I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired.
Nick Harkaway
#84. 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
#85. The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible.
Nick Harkaway
#86. 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
#87. Google says young people don't care about privacy, but when asked if they'd let their parents see their phone bills and other stuff they say no.
Nick Harkaway
#88. 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
#89. Inoue was standing at the point of a spear composed of irate Japanese geeks, and he was pleased to see that the principal reaction on her face was a fizzing, imperious outrage.
Nick Harkaway
#90. 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
#91. If you ask who I aspire to, well, if a single line of mine was as funny as P. G. Wodehouse can be, that would be great.
Nick Harkaway
#92. We lose stories every day because they drift out of use and into the vast limbo of in-copyright, out-of-print books whose ownership is unclear.
Nick Harkaway
#93. Don't fuck around thinking you could have done it better. There is no better. There's just not being dead.
Nick Harkaway
#94. 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
#95. At the heart of both democracy and capitalism is a simple assumption that, across the board, people make free and relatively rational decisions: that we are, to borrow a medical term, Gillick Competent.
Nick Harkaway
#96. 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
#97. ARGH! There's no such thing [as writer's block]. Seriously: THERE. IS. NO. SUCH. THING. You know what there is? There's a bunch of problems, creative and otherwise, that can stop you writing. They are not block. They are important skills.
Nick Harkaway
#98. Soot and sorrow: the Night Market's invocation of desperate seriousness, of doom and disaster.
Nick Harkaway
#99. 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
#100. The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.
Nick Harkaway
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