Top 130 Quotes & Sayings by Nick Harkaway - Page 2

Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

'Tigerman' was born in the front seat of a Hilux SUV on the road north out of Chiang Mai.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All my characters are me, in one way or another.

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 used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Knowledge is not just power - it is control.

I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried.

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

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

Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When the time comes to work, I work.

The tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.

That's what you get for ignoring the beauty of Tupperware.

Never mind, never mind, let's get to the part where we smite the unrighteous. I've brought my most alarming teeth!

Google says young people don't care about privacy, but when asked if they'd let their parents see their phone bills and other stuff they say no.

Piracy is robbery with violence, often segueing into murder, rape and kidnapping. It is one of the most frightening crimes in the world. Using the same term to describe a twelve-year-old swapping music with friends, even thousands of songs, is evidence of a loss of perspective so astounding that it invites and deserves the derision it receives.

I hover over the expensive Scotch and then the Armagnac, but finally settle on a glass of rich red claret. I put it near my nose and nearly pass out. It smells of old houses and aged wood and dark secrets, but also of hard, hot sunshine through ancient shutters and long, wicked afternoons in a four-poster bed. It's not a wine, it's a life, right there in the glass.

There is a sense that everything should be easy, but easy decisions are the ones we should be scared of because if they're easy then we're probably being sold something. This is why I'm worried about "nudge" - it's pushing people in the direction of what you think they should be doing. Easy decisions are dangerous ones.

In a lot of places, of course, the '80s had never really come to an end.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

I love you forever. I am sorry I cannot love you now.

We need to create the institutions that will support the society we want to live in. The only answer is collective action.

The problem isn't who is in charge. It's what is in charge. The problem is that people are encouraged to function as machines. Or, actually, as mechanisms. Human emotion and sympathy are unprofessional. They are inappropriate to the exercise of reason. Everything which makes people good - makes them human - is ruled out. The system doesn't care about people, but we treat it as if it were one of us, as if it were the sum of our goods and not the product of our least admirable compromises.

Society is based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being continually dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything.

I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes.

The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it's so hard to do just one.

And don't tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn't. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with.

A woman who can eat a real bruschetta is a woman you can love and who can love you. Someone who pushes the thing away because it's messy is never going to cackle at you toothlessly across the living room of your retirement cottage or drag you back from your sixth heart attack by sheer furious affection. Never happen. You need a woman who isn't afraid of a faceful of olive oil for that.

If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.

Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

It's usually best not to ask philosophers anything, precisely because they have the habit of what in the Persian language is called sanud: the profitless consideration of unsettling yet inconsequential things.

A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of doing so; only comparable power or anonymity can do that.

A cherry pie is . . . ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life.

It's not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic, it's that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is.