Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Names aren't just coathooks, they're coats. They're the first thing anyone knows about you. "
Nick Harkaway
Coats
First
Just
Related Quotes:
" 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
" Booksellers are tied to publishing - they need conventional publishing models to continue - but for those companies, that's not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can't afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market. "
Nick Harkaway
Apple
Control
You
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Know
Enough
Got
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Line
You
Go
" Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing. "
Nick Harkaway
Wrong
Said
Performance
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Lose
Books
Day
" All my characters are me, in one way or another. "
Nick Harkaway
Me
Way
One Way
" 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
Like
" 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
" Prize lists are out, and you're not on them? Nature of the world - means nothing. Prizes are a lottery. "
Nick Harkaway
Nature
You
Lottery
" The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible. "
Nick Harkaway
Notion
Virtue
Our
" We have a curious relationship with 'funny' in the U.K. We love to laugh, but we also think that making people laugh is just a little bit second-tier, especially in a literary context. "
Nick Harkaway
Funny
Love
People
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Free
Eye
World
" Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other. "
Nick Harkaway
Always
Professional
Say
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Bubble
Better
Wealth
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Funny
Great
Line
" 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
" Knowledge is not just power - it is control. "
Nick Harkaway
Power
Control
Knowledge
" An important part of the Internet is that it provides a space for people whose identities are socially unacceptable. If it enables someone who feels minoritised to be who they want to be, it's actually worth having other people be offensive. I'd much rather have both than have neither. "
Nick Harkaway
Want
Important
Internet
" Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method. "
Nick Harkaway
Google
Exciting
Idea
" The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life. "
Nick Harkaway
Been
Great
Life
" 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
Up
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
People
You
Thought
" 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
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Look
You
Through
" 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
" An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it. "
Nick Harkaway
Myself
Life
Performance
" Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn't tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began. "
Nick Harkaway
Book
Writing
Wife
" I think the reason I wrote screenplays for nearly a decade was because it was my territory. I could stake that out. "
Nick Harkaway
Decade
Reason
Because
" Happiness is boundlessly weird. Other people's choices often seem to delight them, where I would run screaming. "
Nick Harkaway
People
Choices
Happiness