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" Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature. "
Nick Harkaway
Art
Trust
Production
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" Sir Terry Pratchett - he was knighted in 2009, and on him it looked earned rather than entitled - wrote about dragons, wizards, turtles, witches, time-travelling monks, and suitcases with legs. "
Nick Harkaway
Legs
Witches
Dragons
" 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
Lights
Cheese
End
" I am an avid reader of comics, though I came to them late. "
Nick Harkaway
I Am
Avid
Am
" Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other. "
Nick Harkaway
Always
Professional
Say
" 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
Democracy
Simple
Heart
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Time
Writing
Name
" Knowledge is not just power - it is control. "
Nick Harkaway
Power
Control
Knowledge
" 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
Strong
Friends
Control
" 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
Funny
Love
People
" Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn't tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began. "
Nick Harkaway
Book
Writing
Wife
" The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology. "
Nick Harkaway
Culture
Writing
Technology
" The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life. "
Nick Harkaway
Been
Great
Life
" E-readers are uninspired. They're slabs of plastic with fiddly controls and display a badly-formatted, typographically impoverished rendering of a paper book. That's not the electronic book I want. I want a gorgeous physical object, with paper pages, that can transform into any story I choose, perfectly presented on the page. "
Nick Harkaway
Want
Book
Choose
" 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
Wrong
Right
Perception
" 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
Wrong
Said
Performance
" 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
World
Day
Great
" My dad and I compete on the pool table; that's the most important competition of our lives. The fact that I'm writing and it works for me is one of the great joys for him. We talk about writing, and it's great. "
Nick Harkaway
Me
Pool
Competition
" 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
Internet
Choice
Power
" 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'. "
Nick Harkaway
Government
Most
Our
" 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
Think
Time
Moment
" Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method. "
Nick Harkaway
Google
Exciting
Idea
" 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
Myself
I Am
Talk
" Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work. "
Nick Harkaway
Lead
Access
Creative
" 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
Hard
Great
Build
" 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
Human
Technology
More
" The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible. "
Nick Harkaway
Notion
Virtue
Our
" Booksellers are tied to publishing - they need conventional publishing models to continue - but for those companies, that's not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can't afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market. "
Nick Harkaway
Apple
Control
You
" '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
World
Box
More
" 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
Sin
Myself
Science
" I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired. "
Nick Harkaway
Literature
Healthy
Want