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" 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. "

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

Nick Harkaway

Internet

Choice

Power

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

Nick Harkaway

Way

One Way

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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 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

" 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. "

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

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

" I don't do a lot of research, exactly, but I'm constantly wandering through the world finding things incredible and remembering them. "

" I never engage negatively with reviewers. If someone says something that enrages me, I do what I do on stage. I make a joke about myself and move on. Sometimes people say things that are manifestly wrong or even apparently malicious. That's fine, too. It's a response. "

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

" Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, our financial industry and governments leaned on a snake-oil mirage of wealth creation, a bubble predicated on the obvious falsehood that things could only get better. "

" 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. "

" Peace is not a state - it is a choice, and you have to remake it every day. It's possible to get a sort of stability, a habit of peace, but it's like an egg balanced, spinning, on its point: lose your momentum, and your equilibrium is gone, too. "

" 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

Pool

Competition

" 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. "

" I think lots of boys sat down with 'The Three Musketeers' and felt it was a really long book, but then discovered that it's a really gripping swashbuckling story. "

" Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player. "