QUOTES by Nick Harkaway
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
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.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other.
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I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
I'm caught somewhere between introversion and extroversion. Performance is natural to me, joyful, but it is also exhausting. I can feed on it, but the expense is high, too, like being a carnivore: I have to chase down my meals.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
The Internet has the capacity to extend to us genuine choice, and that is not without risk. Real power does entail real responsibility.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
My books are written from the heart, to entertain: they're books I would like to read. Because of that, when I meet people who like them, we have so much to talk about!
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
In abandoning the understanding that things - services, goods, wars, and houses - have costs, we risk becoming infantilised, incapable of making decisions about government or finance, and perhaps above all about the environment, the wellbeing of the planet upon which we depend and which our children will inherit from us.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
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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.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
I make up names for people all the time - it's part of writing. Very often, the name comes with the character, along with of a sense of who they are and what they do.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
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My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler.
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We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
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The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
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Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.
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With true free speech has to come an understanding of when and when not to use it. But you can't legislate that. It must be voluntary - especially in a world where a whisper can reach a million people in an eye blink.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
I wrote the first draft of 'Tigerman' while my wife was pregnant - needless to say, I was relaxed and casual about her well-being during this tender time - and the novel clearly has its center in that panicked parental desperation that accompanies a first child and in the admittedly comedic extremes to which it drives us.
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'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.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
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I'm fascinated by human agency - by the process of decision, both in the individual and the mass.
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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.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
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.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway
Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn't tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began.
Quote by -Nick Harkaway