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" 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. "

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" 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

" Names aren't just coathooks, they're coats. They're the first thing anyone knows about you. "

" I think lots of boys sat down with 'The Three Musketeers' and felt it was a really long book, but then discovered that it's a really gripping swashbuckling story. "

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

" The market, as we're all painfully aware in the aftermath of the banking crisis, can be an idiot. It has no perception of right or wrong, or even sensible or insane. It sees profit. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm a novelist: I spend a great part of my day pretending to myself that I'm in a different world, being a different person, faced with decisions I pretend I haven't created. "

" 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

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

" The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life. "

" I am an avid reader of comics, though I came to them late. "

Nick Harkaway

I Am

Avid

" 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 not shy, exactly, but I am private. I don't like to talk about myself. I had to learn - I was interviewed for print, radio and even TV. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method. "

" 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. "

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

" My dad and I compete on the pool table; that's the most important competition of our lives. The fact that I'm writing and it works for me is one of the great joys for him. We talk about writing, and it's great. "

Nick Harkaway

Pool

Competition

" 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. "