Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" Happiness is boundlessly weird. Other people's choices often seem to delight them, where I would run screaming. "

" 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. "

" Names aren't just coathooks, they're coats. They're the first thing anyone knows about you. "

" It's true that interacting through text means no eyelines, no facial expressions, no tone of voice. That can be an advantage, helping us to consider content rather than eloquence, import rather than source. "

" We need to differentiate between commercial piracy - where criminal organisations produce illicit DVDs on a huge scale - and domestic, unauthorised filesharing, which may or may not be detrimental to overall sales. "

" 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. "

" 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! "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Executive power in any nation arguably has more in common with executive power in another country than with the citizens it should serve. "

" 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. "

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

" Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn't tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began. "

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

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