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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Nick Harkaway Quotes

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.

– Nick Harkaway

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.

– Nick Harkaway

I do not propose that everyone in Guantanamo or its evil twin at Bagram is innocent. I just don’t believe we should incarcerate people without trial and torture them or facilitate and profit from their torture.

– Nick Harkaway

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.

– Nick Harkaway

Steampunk appeals to the idea of uniqueness, to the one-off item, while every mainstream consumer technology of recent years is about putting human beings into ever more granular, packageable and mass-produced identities so that they can be sold or sold to, perfectly mapped and understood.

– Nick Harkaway

I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf.

– Nick Harkaway

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.

– Nick Harkaway

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.

– Nick Harkaway

E-readers are uninspired. They’re slabs of plastic with fiddly controls and display a badly-formatted, typographically impoverished rendering of a paper book. That’s not the electronic book I want. I want a gorgeous physical object, with paper pages, that can transform into any story I choose, perfectly presented on the page.

– Nick Harkaway

My wife runs the charity Reprieve, and so rendition, droning, and capital punishment are very much the topics of our dinner table because of that.

– Nick Harkaway

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

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

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.

– Nick Harkaway

Prize lists are out, and you’re not on them? Nature of the world – means nothing. Prizes are a lottery.

– Nick Harkaway

Booksellers are tied to publishing – they need conventional publishing models to continue – but for those companies, that’s not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can’t afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market.

– Nick Harkaway

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

– Nick Harkaway

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.

– Nick Harkaway

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.

– Nick Harkaway

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.

– Nick Harkaway

Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn’t tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began.

– Nick Harkaway

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.

– Nick Harkaway

I read my father’s books growing up. I thought then and I still think now that his writing is wonderful. It delights and infuriates me in equal measure that he’s still that good.

– Nick Harkaway

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.

– Nick Harkaway

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.

– Nick Harkaway

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

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.

– Nick Harkaway

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

– Nick Harkaway

‘Gone-Away World’ was a shotgun blast, an explosion out of the box I’d put myself into writing film scripts. ‘Tigerman’ is shorter, tighter, more crafted.

– Nick Harkaway

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.

– Nick Harkaway

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

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