Nick Harkaway Quotes

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.

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!

The Internet has the capacity to extend to us genuine choice, and that is not without risk. Real power does entail real responsibility.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing.

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.

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‘.

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.

I think the reason I wrote screenplays for nearly a decade was because it was my territory. I could stake that out.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

After university, I went into film. I started out making tea, managed a brief stint as an assistant director, then found myself writing a screenplay. In the end, I wrote quite a few – but by January 2006, I wanted out.

The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible.

‘Tigerman’ was born in the front seat of a Hilux SUV on the road north out of Chiang Mai.

In a social context, digital technology introduces you to neighbours of the mind – people who are separated by distance, but close to you in thought and interest.

Executive power in any nation arguably has more in common with executive power in another country than with the citizens it should serve.

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.

The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.

Names aren’t just coathooks, they’re coats. They’re the first thing anyone knows about you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Prize lists are out, and you’re not on them? Nature of the world – means nothing. Prizes are a lottery.

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.

Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn’t tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began.

I’m a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn’t be disenfranchised if I tried.

Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.

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.

My reading of history is that we continually inherit trouble.