Words matter. These are the best Nick Harkaway Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work.
I wanted a pseudonym partly because I’m quite shy and private. I know that sounds ludicrous, but if I should be lucky enough to make a hit, I wanted to be able to shrug off the mantel of Nick Harkaway when I got home.
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.
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.
Names aren’t just coathooks, they’re coats. They’re the first thing anyone knows about you.
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.
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.
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.
The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible.
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.
I’m fascinated by human agency – by the process of decision, both in the individual and the mass.
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.
When the time comes to work, I work.
‘Tigerman’ was born in the front seat of a Hilux SUV on the road north out of Chiang Mai.
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.
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.
Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.
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.
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.
Professional politicians will say anything, and they’re always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other.
The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.
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.
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.
We don’t need to chase a nostalgic rendering of Britain as it never was and never can be: we need instead an understanding of who we really are and what a happy, prosperous, just nation might look like.
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’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.
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.
I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf.
I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I’m optimistic, healthy and fair-haired.
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.
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.
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.
I’m a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn’t be disenfranchised if I tried.
Happiness is boundlessly weird. Other people’s choices often seem to delight them, where I would run screaming.
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.
In a novel, even if you put a country in the wrong hemisphere, which I’ve done, I can always claim it was part of the additional weirdness of the story.
My books are written from the heart, to entertain: they’re books I would like to read. Because of that, when I meet people who like them, we have so much to talk about!
An enormous amount of a writer’s life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it.
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 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.
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.
I think the reason I wrote screenplays for nearly a decade was because it was my territory. I could stake that out.
I grew up on the Roger Moore and Sean Connery Bond movies, so the DNA of my spies is extremely ridiculous and goofy.
Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn’t tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began.
