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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Nick Harkaway

Know

Rest

Nature

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

" 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

Natural

" 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. "

" Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other. "

" Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing. "

" 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'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. "

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

" Being a parent is weird. It changes people in subtle and unsubtle ways. In my case, it awoke a kind of manic sentinel in my brain. Anything in the house that might be a threat to the kids or to my wife gets terminated - food, sharp edges, poor wiring. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In the span of a human lifetime, and well within the collective memory, Britain went from a stable imperial power ruling an appreciable fraction of the Earth's surface to being a tumultuous patchwork which was at least superficially in decline. "

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

" Knowledge is not just power - it is control. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 are bodies which think, and we're at home with steampunk because it is an ethos of design and creativity which acknowledges the humanly physical: that which we can understand with our fingers. "

" An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it. "

" 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'. "