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" 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. "

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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. "

Nick Harkaway

Democracy

Simple

Heart

" 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

" I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired. "

" 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

" I'm not an absolutist about free speech. Intellectually, I believe that most of the time it's better to let things get said, argue them, and put lies and stupidities to rest. Practically, I know that newspapers rarely issue corrections with the same prominence they give to denouncements - and Twitter, by its nature, never does. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm fascinated by human agency - by the process of decision, both in the individual and the mass. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There's a saying in the movie industry that if your movie is about what you actually think it's about, you're in big trouble. I think it's the same with books. "

" I never engage negatively with reviewers. If someone says something that enrages me, I do what I do on stage. I make a joke about myself and move on. Sometimes people say things that are manifestly wrong or even apparently malicious. That's fine, too. It's a response. "

" I am the world's most appalling martial artist. I am so bad. I've studied jujitsu, kickboxing, t'ai chi. Once, I was sparring with someone, made a mistake, and managed to knock them down. I was so shocked that I dropped to my knees to see if they were all right, and then they knocked me out cold. From the floor. "

Nick Harkaway

World

Mistake

" 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. "

" Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler. "

" I wanted a pseudonym partly because I'm quite shy and private. I know that sounds ludicrous, but if I should be lucky enough to make a hit, I wanted to be able to shrug off the mantel of Nick Harkaway when I got home. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Nick Harkaway

Down

Natural