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" 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

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

" 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

" The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means. "

" An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it. "

" I think the reason I wrote screenplays for nearly a decade was because it was my territory. I could stake that out. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Knowledge is not just power - it is control. "

" 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. "

Nick Harkaway

Line

You

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

" 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. "

" The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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'. "

" Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method. "

" 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

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

" 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. "

" My reading of history is that we continually inherit trouble. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" E-readers are uninspired. They're slabs of plastic with fiddly controls and display a badly-formatted, typographically impoverished rendering of a paper book. That's not the electronic book I want. I want a gorgeous physical object, with paper pages, that can transform into any story I choose, perfectly presented on the page. "

" 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. "