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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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

" Digital books are still painfully ugly and weirdly irritating to interact with. They look like copies of paper, but they can't be designed or typeset in the same way as paper, and however splendid the cover images may look on a hi-res screen, they're still images rather than physical things. "

Nick Harkaway

Ugly

Digital

" I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When the time comes to work, I work. "

Nick Harkaway

Work

Time

" 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. "

" I am an avid reader of comics, though I came to them late. "

Nick Harkaway

I Am

Avid

" 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. "

" All my characters are me, in one way or another. "

Nick Harkaway

Way

One Way

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "