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" 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. "

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" 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

Happy

Need

Understanding

" 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. "

" '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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

Nick Harkaway

Serve

Country

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't do a lot of research, exactly, but I'm constantly wandering through the world finding things incredible and remembering them. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other. "

" The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering. "

" 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. "

" 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

Ugly

Digital

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Whether you're choosing for yourself or for a character - or for a child - names have baggage of their own. "

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

" 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

Pool

Competition

" The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "