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" Knowledge is not just power - it is control. "
Nick Harkaway
Power
Control
Knowledge
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" 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. "
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" I grew up on the Roger Moore and Sean Connery Bond movies, so the DNA of my spies is extremely ridiculous and goofy. "
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" The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering. "
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" 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. "
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" The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life. "
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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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" 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. "
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Funny
Great
Line
" 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. "
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Eye
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" Being a parent is weird. It changes people in subtle and unsubtle ways. In my case, it awoke a kind of manic sentinel in my brain. Anything in the house that might be a threat to the kids or to my wife gets terminated - food, sharp edges, poor wiring. "
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Parent
Wife
Weird
" Executive power in any nation arguably has more in common with executive power in another country than with the citizens it should serve. "
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Serve
More
Country
" Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature. "
Nick Harkaway
Art
Trust
Production
" 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. "
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Good
Father
Writing
" 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. "
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Happy
Need
Understanding
" 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
Like
Books
Heart
" I am an avid reader of comics, though I came to them late. "
Nick Harkaway
I Am
Avid
Am
" 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. "
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Strong
Friends
Control
" 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
" Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player. "
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Infrastructure
Differently
Money
" 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
" My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler. "
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Family
Relationship
Confidence
" All my characters are me, in one way or another. "
Nick Harkaway
Me
Way
One Way
" 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. "
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Say
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" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Want
Book
Choose
" 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. "
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Legs
Witches
Dragons
" 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. "
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World
Mistake
Me
" I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf. "
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Our
Work
House
" Names aren't just coathooks, they're coats. They're the first thing anyone knows about you. "
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Coats
First
Just
" In a social context, digital technology introduces you to neighbours of the mind - people who are separated by distance, but close to you in thought and interest. "
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People
You
Thought
" In the aftermath of September 11, you can't - as Tony Blair was so fond of suggesting - draw a line under historical events. They don't go away. They come back. "
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Line
You
Go
" 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