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" 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. "

Nick Harkaway

Think

People

Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" In a novel, even if you put a country in the wrong hemisphere, which I've done, I can always claim it was part of the additional weirdness of the story. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 'Gone-Away World' was a shotgun blast, an explosion out of the box I'd put myself into writing film scripts. 'Tigerman' is shorter, tighter, more crafted. "

Nick Harkaway

World

Box

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

" 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. "

" The Internet has the capacity to extend to us genuine choice, and that is not without risk. Real power does entail real responsibility. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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

" The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering. "

" 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

Books

Heart

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing. "

" 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. "

" Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work. "

" I wrote the first draft of 'Tigerman' while my wife was pregnant - needless to say, I was relaxed and casual about her well-being during this tender time - and the novel clearly has its center in that panicked parental desperation that accompanies a first child and in the admittedly comedic extremes to which it drives us. "

" I'm usually reading too many books - in fact, I'm usually reading enough books that if the stack fell on me, I'd be injured. "

" Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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