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" 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
More
Country
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" 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. "
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" Happiness is boundlessly weird. Other people's choices often seem to delight them, where I would run screaming. "
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" Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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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" The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means. "
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" Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing. "
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" 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. "
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" The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible. "
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" 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 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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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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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" Names aren't just coathooks, they're coats. They're the first thing anyone knows about you. "
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" 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. "
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" An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work. "
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" 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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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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