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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. "
Nick Harkaway
Pretend
Need
Perfect
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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. "
Nick Harkaway
Look
You
Through
" 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
" The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible. "
Nick Harkaway
Notion
Virtue
Our
" We don't need to chase a nostalgic rendering of Britain as it never was and never can be: we need instead an understanding of who we really are and what a happy, prosperous, just nation might look like. "
Nick Harkaway
Happy
Need
Understanding
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Within
Earth
Human
" I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired. "
Nick Harkaway
Literature
Healthy
Want
" I know that when I talk to my parents and my friends, there's a strong feeling of the world out of control and damaged. "
Nick Harkaway
Strong
Friends
Control
" 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
" The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life. "
Nick Harkaway
Been
Great
Life
" Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method. "
Nick Harkaway
Google
Exciting
Idea
" All my characters are me, in one way or another. "
Nick Harkaway
Me
Way
One Way
" My reading of history is that we continually inherit trouble. "
Nick Harkaway
History
Inherit
Trouble
" 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 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Know
Enough
Got
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Human
Technology
More
" 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
" I make up names for people all the time - it's part of writing. Very often, the name comes with the character, along with of a sense of who they are and what they do. "
Nick Harkaway
Time
Writing
Name
" The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means. "
Nick Harkaway
End
Because
Anything
" 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
" Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century. "
Nick Harkaway
Well
Still
Empire
" 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
Me
Natural
" As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story. "
Nick Harkaway
Writing
See
Story
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Myself
I Am
Talk
" 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
" 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
" Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work. "
Nick Harkaway
Lead
Access
Creative
" 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
" Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature. "
Nick Harkaway
Art
Trust
Production
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Me
Pool
Competition
" I think the reason I wrote screenplays for nearly a decade was because it was my territory. I could stake that out. "
Nick Harkaway
Decade
Reason
Because