Words matter. These are the best Robert Harris Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There’s nothing more interesting than the details of someone’s life.
Humans have changed little over time. We think we’ve invented the modern world but they were making better speeches 2,000 years ago and grappling with issues of empire and terrorism.
Cut your manuscript ruthlessly but never throw anything away: it’s amazing how often a discarded scene or description, which wouldn’t fit in one place, will work perfectly later.
I write as well as I can. I’m a journalist at heart, so it’s the story that matters.
It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.
I like to take people you wouldn’t really think people would write novels about: an aqueduct engineer, a code-breaker, a hedge-fund manager. It’s in those sorts of lives that I find more fascination than in a CIA operative or a Marine or something like that.
You find out what you think by talking to yourself.
Within reason, I can write what I like and spend as long doing it as is necessary. That is a luxury beyond price.
I see myself as the literary equivalent of a skilled lathe-operator, or a basket-weaver; a potter, maybe: I make mildly diverting objects that people want to buy.
It’s when you’ve stopped writing and are doing other things, especially when you’re asleep, that the real work is done.
Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.
It’s easy enough to get into power. You can make promises and try to be all things to all people. But the moment you have to make decisions, you’re going to annoy at least half of them. Whatever you do, in the end you’re almost certain to be brought down by your own character traits.
For me, as I suspect for most people, there comes a point where you have enough. If you’ve got £20 million, why keep going until you’ve got £100 million or £1,000 million? Does anyone need another vast yacht or private jet or a house full of gold?
Having the urge to write a novel, especially if you’ve yet to be published, is like having a medical condition impossible to mention in polite company – it’s a relief simply to know there are fellow-sufferers out there.
The true currency of life is time, not money, and we’ve all got a limited stock of that.
I think it’s very, very hard not to go slightly crazy if you’re in the top in politics – especially if you’re there for a long time.
Writers and journalists tend to be simplistic about politics when, like all other areas of life, it’s more complicated.
Storytelling has a narcotic power.
We live in an age of great jitteriness in the financial markets. And there’s no doubt at all, I think, that the volume of computer-traded stocks has helped contribute to that.
I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.
If you go back, ‘The Great Gatsby’ would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business.
In a way I’m almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.
My greatest regret as a writer is that I’ve never been able to include as many jokes as I’d like.
We say, ‘The market plummets,’ like it’s some roaring creature.
Social mores change all the time. In the mid-1970s, it would’ve been astonishing, say, to see two men holding hands in the streets. And the attitude to having a fling with a girl, or whatever, was quite different then.
My father left school at 14, my mother at 13. My father was clever and well-read. He took a newspaper, always watched the news, discussed it all the time.
You can’t ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can’t repeal human nature.
First comes an idea. Then, characters begin to evolve out of the landscape of that idea. And then, finally, characters dominate: plot is simply a function of what these people might do or be. Everything has to flow from their personalities; otherwise it will not be emotionally engaging, or plausible.
The financial markets tend to be just a backdrop for a novel, for a heist or something that isn’t necessarily integral to it. On the whole, I don’t think the financial world has been well served by novels.
I used to love politics. I can’t say I do any more. All the fun has gone out of it. Each side is engaged in this trench warfare of managerialism. They’re all too scared to say anything that might make them appear something other than completely bland.
