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" 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

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

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

" I'm usually reading too many books - in fact, I'm usually reading enough books that if the stack fell on me, I'd be injured. "

" 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. "

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

" Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it. "

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

Nick Harkaway

Serve

Country

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried. "

" When the time comes to work, I work. "

Nick Harkaway

Work

Time

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't do a lot of research, exactly, but I'm constantly wandering through the world finding things incredible and remembering them. "

" 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. "

" 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 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 an irredeemable urbanite. I can't imagine living more than a five-minute walk from my fellow human beings. Other people are vital to my peace of mind. "

" The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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