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" I don't do a lot of research, exactly, but I'm constantly wandering through the world finding things incredible and remembering them. "
Nick Harkaway
Remembering
Research
World
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" The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life. "
Nick Harkaway
Been
Great
Life
" 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
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Government
Challenge
Anger
" My books are written from the heart, to entertain: they're books I would like to read. Because of that, when I meet people who like them, we have so much to talk about! "
Nick Harkaway
Like
Books
Heart
" I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf. "
Nick Harkaway
Our
Work
House
" 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
" 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
" Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature. "
Nick Harkaway
Art
Trust
Production
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Lived
Characteristics
Earth
" 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
" 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
" Happiness is boundlessly weird. Other people's choices often seem to delight them, where I would run screaming. "
Nick Harkaway
People
Choices
Happiness
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" My reading of history is that we continually inherit trouble. "
Nick Harkaway
History
Inherit
Trouble
" 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
" 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 read my father's books growing up. I thought then and I still think now that his writing is wonderful. It delights and infuriates me in equal measure that he's still that good. "
Nick Harkaway
Good
Father
Writing
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Think
Home
Design
" 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
" I think lots of boys sat down with 'The Three Musketeers' and felt it was a really long book, but then discovered that it's a really gripping swashbuckling story. "
Nick Harkaway
Three
Book
Down
" The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology. "
Nick Harkaway
Culture
Writing
Technology
" 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
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Now
Reality
Person
" 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
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Trouble
You
Think
" 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
" Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it. "
Nick Harkaway
How
Know
Surveillance