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" The reason steampunk attracts people is that it is premised on a technology which is visible and pleasing to the naked eye, and whose moving parts are comprehensible on a human scale. "
Nick Harkaway
Naked
Moving
Eye
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" Names aren't just coathooks, they're coats. They're the first thing anyone knows about you. "
Nick Harkaway
Coats
First
Just
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Now
Reality
Person
" 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
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Writing
Most
Now
" I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried. "
Nick Harkaway
Kids
Married
Middle-Aged
" I want a politics that doesn't need to pretend to be holy or perfect or infallible. I want a politics that gets on with it. "
Nick Harkaway
Pretend
Need
Perfect
" I'm fascinated by human agency - by the process of decision, both in the individual and the mass. "
Nick Harkaway
Decision
Process
Individual
" 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
" The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means. "
Nick Harkaway
End
Because
Anything
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Down
Me
Natural
" Revolutions come in two stages: the bit where everything gets smashed and the bit where you have to build it again. The first is great fun; the second is so very hard. "
Nick Harkaway
Hard
Great
Build
" 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
" 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'. "
Nick Harkaway
Government
Most
Our
" 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
" The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us. "
Nick Harkaway
Government
Challenge
Anger
" My reading of history is that we continually inherit trouble. "
Nick Harkaway
History
Inherit
Trouble
" A lot of author events are basically hour-long classes in entropy perched on bad seating under bright, hard lights, with - if you're lucky - bad Chardonnay and cheese on a stick waiting for you at the end of the ride. "
Nick Harkaway
Lights
Cheese
End
" My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler. "
Nick Harkaway
Family
Relationship
Confidence
" 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
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Best
World
Good
" I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf. "
Nick Harkaway
Our
Work
House
" Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work. "
Nick Harkaway
Lead
Access
Creative
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Trouble
You
Think
" 'Gone-Away World' was a shotgun blast, an explosion out of the box I'd put myself into writing film scripts. 'Tigerman' is shorter, tighter, more crafted. "
Nick Harkaway
World
Box
More
" 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
Me
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Book
Name
Names
" 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
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Writing
See
Story
" 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. "
Nick Harkaway
Where
Sales
Need
" The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life. "
Nick Harkaway
Been
Great
Life