Top 87 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Harris - Page 2

Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?

It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you're forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.

To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

In a generation or two, or maybe sooner, young golfers of true sporting instinct will wonder why all this handling of the ball is necessary. It will seem to them that the game is not as good as it might be.

What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them!

[Boxer is] the ultimate tool for the serious pro' that can't afford the time and patience to mess around with lesser products.

If long hitting is the thing that causes the spectators to whistle through their teeth in wonderment, why not play tournaments up and down an expansive stadium?

People perish. Books are immortal.

To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.

A police state is a country run by criminals

If you spend too long trying to avoid death, you will be dead in at least one way.

Their souls were contagious. ... Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them.

That young man seeks opportunities to test his principles as readily as a drunk picks fights in a bar.

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men's souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses? Boring? You might as well say that life itself is boring!

But only a fool sails into combat with nature

Cicero smiled at us. 'The art of life is to deal with problems as they arise, rather than destory one's spirit by worrying about them too far in advance. Especially tonight.

By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.

Tape is the archiving champ and has been for decades. Reliable, less expensive than disks and available in large-scale robotic systems that store petabytes.

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.

The natural impulse of men is to follow and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate.

History is too important to be left to the historians.

I've always just wanted to earn my living by writing. The best thing is to go into my study in the morning and stay there and put words together.

Egyptologists, skilled in piecing together the papyri of lost civilisations, suddenly discovered that the same talent could be applied to working out the pattern of German radio traffic.

Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.

Another of Cicero's maxims was that if you must do something unpopular, you might as well do it wholeheartedly, for in politics there is no credit to be won by timidity.

A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.