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

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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible. "

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

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

" I think the reason I wrote screenplays for nearly a decade was because it was my territory. I could stake that out. "

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

" I make up names for people all the time - it's part of writing. Very often, the name comes with the character, along with of a sense of who they are and what they do. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" We lose stories every day because they drift out of use and into the vast limbo of in-copyright, out-of-print books whose ownership is unclear. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I studied revolutions at university, and I think each revolution must begin with a moment of 'no.' If enough people have that moment at the same time, it becomes a movement. "