Robert Harris Quotes

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

Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

There are occasions when losing is a victory, so long as there is a fight.

You can't ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can't repeal human nature.

But as Cicero had long tried to convince him, a speech is a performance, not a philosophical discourse: it must appeal to the emotions more than to the intellect

From the Latin, con clavis: 'with a key'.

Perhaps Mother Nature is punishing us, he thought, for our greed and selfishness. We torture her at all hours by iron and wood, fire and stone. We dig her up and dump her in the sea. We sink mineshafts into her and drag out her entrails - and all for a jewel to wear on a pretty finger. Who can blame her if she occasionally quivers with anger?

Isn't an awareness of their transience what gives these moments their exquisite edge?

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.

History was a patchwork of voids. The great university libraries and public archives had mostly rotted away or been used as fuel in the Dark Age. An entire generation's correspondence and memories had vanished into this mysterious entity the antiquarians called 'The Cloud'.

Quod volimus credimus libenter
we always believe what we want to believe

....let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end........Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.

A comrade who deserts a comrade is a cowardly dog, and all such dogs should die a dog's death, comrade -

He felt more human with his boots on. A man can face the world with something on his feet.

I write as well as I can. I'm a journalist at heart, so it's the story that matters.

The likeness was stricking. Not exact, of course - no man ever looks exactly like his father - but there was something there, no doubt about it, even with the younger man's beard and straggling hair. Something in the cast of the eyes and the bone structure, perhaps, or in the play of the expression: a kind of ponderous agility, a genetic shadow that was beyond the skills of any actor.

I sense that I am dawdling in this narrative, having already reached my eighth roll of Hieratica, and need to speed it up a little, else either I shall die on the job, or you will be worn out reading.

This was the problem with drinks parties: getting stuck with a person you didn't want to talk to while someone you did was tantalisingly in view.

Young man, I applaud your courage and your sincerity, but I'm afraid you need to learn a few lessons in political reality. It is simply impossible to expect the peoples of Britain and France to take up arms to deny the right of self-determination to ethnic Germans who are trapped in a foreign country they wish to leave. Against that single reality, all else fails. As for what Hitler dreams of doing in the next five years - well, we shall have to wait and see. He's been making these threats ever since Mein Kampf. My objective is clear: to avert war in the short term, and then to try to build a lasting peace for the future - one month at a time, one day at a time, if needs be. The worst act I can possibly commit for the future of mankind would be to walk away from this conference tonight.

I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.

When did the defendant first

Rising up starkly over the snowy plain, and that the plebs were flocking out

In the concealed darkness of the bag her fingers began to work her rosary, clumsily at first but with increasing dexterity - Push. Click. Slide. Press -

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?

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.

Nowadays, of course, most senators employ a slave or two two out their speeches; I have even heard of some who have no idea of what they are going to say until the next is place in front of them; how these fellows can call themselves statesman defeats me

There is no such thing as a secret - not really, not in the modern world, not with photography and telegraphy and railways and newspaper presses.

The most important thing in any endeavour is to get involved in the fight, and in that way learn what to do next.

A nothing that said everything. - Pg. 173

The art of life is to deal with one's problems as they arise; rather than destoy your spirit by worrying about them too far in advance.

An excess of simplicity, after all, was just another form of ostentation, and pride in one's humility a sin.

Right, you see that girl over there, the one in that group that keeps looking right at you?'...'Right, let's say I'm convinced she's wearing black knickers - she looks like a black knickers kind of gal to me - and I'm so sure that's what she's wearing, so positive of that sartorial fact, I want to bet a million dollars on it. The trouble is, if I'm wrong, I'm wiped out. So I also bet she's wearing knickers that aren't black, but are any one of a whole basket of colours - let's say I put nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that possibility: that's the rest of the market; that's the hedge. This is a crude example, okay, in every sense, but hear me out. Now if I'm right, I make fifty K, but even if I'm wrong I'm going to lose fifty K, because I'm hedged. And because ninety-five per cent of my million dollars is not in use - I'm never going to be called on to show it: the only risk is in the spread - I can make similar bets with other people. Or I can bet it on something else entirely. And the beauty of it is I don't have to be right all the time - if I can just get the colour of her underwear right fifty-five per cent of the time I'm going to wind up very rich...

As praetor, Cicero was expected to take in promising pupils from good families to study law with him, and in May, after the Senate recess, a new young intern of sixteen joined his chambers. This was Marcus Caelius Rufus from Interamnia, the son of a wealthy banker and prominent election official of the Velina tribe. Cicero agreed, largely as a political favor, to supervise the boy's training

You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.

Gratitude", he said, quoting Stalin, "is a dog's disease.

Acceptance. That, he had learned in Russia many years ago, was the secret of survival ... Accept it. Wait. Let the system exhaust itself. Protest will only raise your blood pressure.

Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called 'heightened interrogation'. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.

Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. - Pg. 195

This is the nightmare I have always dreaded. It's as if we've learned nothing from the last war and we are reliving August 1914. One by one the countries of the world will be dragged in - and for what?

And so we drifted towards calamity. At times, Cicero was shrewd enough to see it. "Can a constitution devised centuries ago to replace a monarchy, and based upon a citizens' militia, possibly hope to run an empire whose scope is beyond anything ever dreamed of by its framers? Or must the existence of standing armies and the influx of inconceivable wealth inevitably destroy our democratic system?

But it is one of the tricks of the successful politician to be able to hold many things in mind at once and to switch between them as the need arises;

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

His scars and his tattoos were the medals of his lifetime. He was proud to wear them.

It is my first lesson in the cabalistic power of "secret intelligence": two words that can make otherwise sane men abandon their reason and cavort like idiots.

If one first gives himself to the Lord, all other giving is easy.

I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.

At that instant i knew there was no horror the world could offer - no war, no genocide, no famine, no childhood cancer - to which Sidney Kroll would not see the funny side

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.

Well, good luck to you both. Rome will be the winner whoever is the victor'. Cicero began to move away but then checked himself, and a slight frown crossed his face. He returned to Catulus. 'One more thing, if I may? Who proposed this widening of the franchise?' 'Caesar' Although Latin is a language rich in subtlety and metaphor, I cannot command the words, either in that tongue or even in Greek, to describe Cicero's expression at that moment. 'Dear gods' he said in a tone of utter shock. 'Is it possible he means to stand himself?' 'Of course not. That would be ridiculous. He's far too young. He's thirty-six. He's not yet even been elected praetor' 'Yes, but even so, in my opinion, you would be well advised to reconvene your college as quickly as possible and go back to the existing method of selection.' 'That is impossible' 'Why?' 'The bill to change the franchise was laid before the people this morning' 'By whom?' 'Labienus' 'Ah!' Cicero clapped his hand to his forehead.

He was a devoted follower of the teachings of Epicurus - "that pleasure is the beginning and end of living happily" - although I hasten to add that he was an Epicurean not in the commonly misunderstood sense, as a seeker after luxury, but in the true meaning, as a pursuer of what the Greeks call ataraxia, or freedom from disturbance. He consequently avoided arguments and unpleasantness of any kind (needless to say, he was unmarried) and desired only to contemplate philosophy by day and dine by night with his cultured friends. He

History is too important to be left to the historians.

Working 14 hours a day until you're 55 and missing your kids growing up is not what I would consider a recipe for happiness.

Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk's too big, the desk's too small, there's too much noise, there's too much quiet, it's too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and simply to start.

No one can really claim to know politics properly until he has stayed up all night writing a speech for delivery the following day. While the world sleeps, the orator paces by lamplight, wondering what madness ever brought him to this occupation in the first place. Arguments are prepared and discarded. The exhausted mind ceases to have any coherent grip upon the purpose of the enterprise, so that often--usually an hour or two after midnight--there comes a point where failing to turn up, feigning illness, and hiding at home seem the only realistic options. And then, somehow, just asa panic and humiliation beckon, the parts cohere, and there it is: a speech. A second-rate orator now retires gratefully to bed. A Cicero stays up and commits it to memory.

To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.

Everyone thinks politics will just go on the way it is. I don't agree.

History wasn't made without taking risks, that much he knew. So maybe sometimes you had to take risks to write it, too?

Nothing is more important to a nation than its history. It is the earth upon which any society stands.

She had the resigned indifference of extreme old age. Buildings and empires rose and fell. It snowed. It stopped snowing. People came and went. One day death would come for her, and she would not find that surprising either, and she would not care -

Cicero himself appeared, hand in hand with Tullia, nodding good morning to everyone, greeting each by name ("the first rule in politics, Tiro: never forget a face").

Men mistook measurement for understanding. And they always had to put themselves at the center of everything. That was their greatest conceit. The earth is becoming warmer-it must be our fault! The mountain is destroying us-we have not propitiated the gods! It rains too much, it rains too little-a comfort to think that these things are somehow connected to our behavior, that if only we lived a little better, a little more frugally, our virtue would be rewarded. But here was nature, sweeping toward him-unknowable, all-conquering, indifferent-and he saw in her fires the futility of human pretensions.

Leaders today are isolated by phalanxes of body guards. It's profoundly undemocratic, the way they have used terrorism as a means to protect themselves.

At first I thought I would never recover from Cicero's death. But time wipes out everything, even grief. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that grief is almost entirely a question of perspective. For the first few years I used to sigh and think, 'Well, he would still be in his sixties now,' and then a decade later, with surprise, 'My goodness, he would be seventy-five,' but nowadays I think, 'Well, he would be long since dead in any case, so what does it matter how he died in comparison with how he lived?

Violence crackled around him in the dry air, like static electricity

What are the only weapons I possess, Tiro?" he asked me, and then he answered his own question. "These." he said, gesturing at his books. "Words. Caesar and Pompey have their soldiers, Crassus his wealth, Clodius his bullies on the street. My only legions are my words. By language I rose, and by language I shall survive.

Politics is never a victory, it's just the remorseless grinding forward of events.

I feel as if I have walked into a mirrored room and glimpsed myself from an unfamiliar angle for the first time. Is that really what I look like? Is that who I am?

The library was destroyed years back. My father-in-law used to say nothing burned so well on a cold winter's night as a good book.

The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it - whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust.

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.

But only a fool sails into combat with nature

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.

Golf requires only a few simple Rules and Regulations to guide the players in the true nature of its sporting appeal. The spirit of the game is its own referee.

Eloquence which does not startle I don't consider eloquence. CICERO, LETTER TO BRUTUS, 48 B.C.

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.

The kulaks were contagious. Their souls were contagious. They carried the spores of counter-revolution.

Nature has granted man no better gift than the shortness of life. The senses grow dull, the limbs are numb, sight, bearing, gait, even the teeth and alimentary organs die before we do, and yet this period is reckoned a portion of life. - Pg. 82

Jericho lowered himself carefully to his knees. He covered his eyes and moved his lips like all the others, but he had no faith in any of it. Faith in mathematics, yes; faith in logic, of course; faith in the trajectory of the stars, yes, perhaps. But faith in a God, Christian or otherwise?

Against the alchemy of two naked bodies in a bed in the darkness, and against all the complex longings and attachments and commitments such intimacy might arouse, he had nothing with which to fight.

What she needed was someone who would take her for the whole night. Someone decent and respectable, with an apartment of his own. But how could you ever judge what men were really like? It was the young ones with the swaggering walks and the loud mouths who ended up bursting into tears and showing you pictures of their girlfriends. It was the bespectacled bankers and lawyers who liked to knock you around.

It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.

Anyone found not enjoying themselves will be shot.

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

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.

Like interviewing a new cleaner. Do you want someone who can give you the history of cleaning and the theory of cleaning, or do you want someone who'll just get down and clean your fucking house? They chose you because they think you'll clean their fucking house.

Often the most powerful men in a state can pass down a street unrecognized, while the most famous bask in feted impotence

I can't get very excited about the House of Commons these days because I don't feel the power is there. What is really bizarre is that you sense it is not in Washington either. It is now very hard even to locate the levers of power, let alone to pull them and change things.

I make no claim to be a philosopher, but this much I have observed: that whenever a thing seems at its zenith, you may be sure its destruction has already started.

A police state is a country run by criminals

What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason

Where was the respect? The boys all looked like girls and the girls all looked like whores. Clearly, the country was already halfway in the shit.

I am sure future historians will say the biggest and most astonishing change in politics has been the embracing of all the tenets of Thatcherism by the party of Keir Hardie: trade union legislation, Europe, the replacement of Trident, 10 per cent tax for people who have made millions from their companies.

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?

History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.

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

All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books - books so bad they aren't even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published.
And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don't ring true. I'm not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you're reading it.

Unfortunately, freedom alone is not enough, by far. If there is a shortage of bread, a shortage of butter and fats, a shortage of textiles, and if housing conditions are bad, freedom will not carry you very far. It is very difficult, comrades, to live on freedom alone.

If I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force, I should feel that it must be resisted. Under such a domination, life for people who believe in liberty would not be worth living. But war is a fearful thing, and we must be very clear, before we embark on it, that it is really the great issues that are at stake, and that the call to risk everything in their defence, when all the consequences are weighed, is irresistible.

Well, well - be careful of what questions you ask, for fear of what answers you may receive.

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