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" Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn't tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" It's true that interacting through text means no eyelines, no facial expressions, no tone of voice. That can be an advantage, helping us to consider content rather than eloquence, import rather than source. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I grew up on the Roger Moore and Sean Connery Bond movies, so the DNA of my spies is extremely ridiculous and goofy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Characteristics

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

" 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'm not an absolutist about free speech. Intellectually, I believe that most of the time it's better to let things get said, argue them, and put lies and stupidities to rest. Practically, I know that newspapers rarely issue corrections with the same prominence they give to denouncements - and Twitter, by its nature, never does. "