Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I am an avid reader of comics, though I came to them late. "
Nick Harkaway
I Am
Avid
Am
Related Quotes:
" 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
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Writing
Tea
Myself
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Funny
Great
Line
" I do not propose that everyone in Guantanamo or its evil twin at Bagram is innocent. I just don't believe we should incarcerate people without trial and torture them or facilitate and profit from their torture. "
Nick Harkaway
Believe
Evil
People
" The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life. "
Nick Harkaway
Been
Great
Life
" Knowledge is not just power - it is control. "
Nick Harkaway
Power
Control
Knowledge
" 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
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Book
Name
Names
" Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player. "
Nick Harkaway
Infrastructure
Differently
Money
" My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler. "
Nick Harkaway
Family
Relationship
Confidence
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Free
Eye
World
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Writing
Most
Now
" Names aren't just coathooks, they're coats. They're the first thing anyone knows about you. "
Nick Harkaway
Coats
First
Just
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Fact
Enough
Books
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
You
Always
Country
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Punishment
Wife
Table
" I do public appearances. I'm bluff, hearty, goofy. I wear loud clothes, and I read the funny bits. I occasionally get taken to task for one thing or another, and I acknowledge my fault, my flaw, my failure, and I move on. "
Nick Harkaway
Funny
Clothes
Task
" I grew up on the Roger Moore and Sean Connery Bond movies, so the DNA of my spies is extremely ridiculous and goofy. "
Nick Harkaway
DNA
Bond
Up
" Whether you're choosing for yourself or for a character - or for a child - names have baggage of their own. "
Nick Harkaway
Character
Yourself
Child
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Decisions
Children
Finance
" An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it. "
Nick Harkaway
Myself
Life
Performance
" 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
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Think
People
Perspective
" 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
Like
" 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
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Pretend
Need
Perfect
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Peace Of Mind
People
Walk
" Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature. "
Nick Harkaway
Art
Trust
Production
" Prize lists are out, and you're not on them? Nature of the world - means nothing. Prizes are a lottery. "
Nick Harkaway
Nature
You
Lottery
" When the time comes to work, I work. "
Nick Harkaway
Work
Time