Nick Harkaway Quotes

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

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. ~ Nick Harkaway

He wondered if today was that day, if he'd wake up different, wake up someone else who remembered him fondly. A new Doctor. He wondered if he'd approve. Would he be more gentle? That might not be so bad. More vengeful? He hoped not. Maybe he'd be a girl. That was distantly possible. Never been a girl. The Corsair had been a girl for a while. New perspective. Confuse people. Keep life interesting. ~ Nick Harkaway

You've picked up a rummy habit," James Banister said cordially as they approached one another. "Sort of a crouch. You look a bit ... well, I'm sorry, but you look a bit Victor Hugo, if you catch my drift. Would you like to adjourn to a cathedral or something? ~ Nick Harkaway

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. ~ Nick Harkaway

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. ~ Nick Harkaway

Kershaw had long ago realized, apparently, that dealing with Brits was tricky. You had to listen to what a Brit was saying - which was invariably that he thought XYZ was a terrific idea and he hoped it went very well for you - while at the same time paying heed to the greasy, nauseous suspicion you had that, although every word and phrase indicated approval, somehow the sum of the whole was that you'd have to be a mental pygmy to come up with this plan and a complete fucking idiot to pursue it. After six years working with the Brits in various theatres he'd come to the conclusion that they didn't do it on purpose. The thing was, Brits actually thought that subtext was plain text. To a Brit, the modern English language was vested with hundreds of years of unbroken history and cultural nuance, so that every single word had a host of implications depending on who said it to whom, when, and how. British soldiers, for example, gave entire reports to their commanders by the way they said 'good morning, sir' and then had to spend half an hour telling them the detail, which was why the Brits always looked bored in briefings. They could sense the trajectory of the conversation, knew the bad news was coming now and the good news now and that there was a question on the end which needed thinking about. With a bit of work they could deduce the question, too, but they always waited politely for it to be asked so that no one felt rushed. ~ Nick Harkaway

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. ~ Nick Harkaway

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

He hates chain stores and fast-food restaurants, mass-produced items and fashionable clothes - any instance of something that is repeated across the world regardless of local context. These things deny the uniqueness of each moment and each person. They function as if we were all printed out of plastic like egg boxes, and they try to make us function the same way. They are the intrusion of perfection into our grubby, smelly, sweaty living place. ~ Nick Harkaway

ARGH! There's no such thing [as writer's block]. Seriously: THERE. IS. NO. SUCH. THING. You know what there is? There's a bunch of problems, creative and otherwise, that can stop you writing. They are not block. They are important skills. ~ Nick Harkaway

It is known, among coppers and criminals alike, that society can be policed only because it consents. When the burden of law or government is too great, or too oppressive, or when economic need or famine breaks the normal course of life, there simply are not – can never be – enough coppers to hold the line. ~ Nick Harkaway

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

He concluded that governments were like wars: the reasons and the forces might change, but it was still the same dying over the same soil. ~ Nick Harkaway

Are you addicted if there is simply no reason for you to do anything else? ~ Nick Harkaway

Because for Gonzo, anything which may explode at any moment is clearly a girl. ~ 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 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. ~ Nick Harkaway

Dressing, I chose the second shirt, the one softened in the mouth of a trained and perfumed albino hippopotamus and made entirely of pigeon's wool, because it goes better with the shoes than the one stitched with baby hair. ~ Nick Harkaway

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

What will you tell him?"
"The truth."
Fortismer thinks about that.
"Yes," he says at last. "Probably the best thing. Bloody deceptive, honesty. ~ Nick Harkaway

When you were utterly fucked and you didn't know what to do, you got busy making sure everyone else was all right and told them not to worry and by the end of it there was a good chance you'd convinced yourself. And if you hadn't, well, sooner or later you either died or you didn't and either way the problem went away. ~ Nick Harkaway

This, not incidentally, is another perfect setting for deindividuation: on one side, the functionary behind a wall of security glass following a script laid out with the intention that it should be applied no matter what the specific human story may be, told to remain emotionally disinvested as far as possible so as to avoid preferential treatment of one person over another - and needing to follow that advice to avoid being swamped by empathy for fellow human beings in distress. The functionary becomes a mixture of Zimbardo's prison guards and the experimenter himself, under siege from without while at the same time following an inflexible rubric set down by those higher up the hierarchical chain, people whose job description makes them responsible, but who in turn see themselves as serving the general public as a non-specific entity and believe or have been told that only strict adherence to a system can produce impartial fairness. Fairness is supposed to be vested in the code: no human can or should make the system fairer by exercising judgement. In other words, the whole thing creates a collective responsibility culminating in a blameless loop. Everyone assumes that it's not their place to take direct personal responsibility for what happens; that level of vested individual power is part of the previous almost feudal version of responsibility. The deindividuation is actually to a certain extent the desired outcome, though its negative consequences are not. ~ Nick Harkaway

I am Nemesis, meting out just deserts ~ Nick Harkaway

Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks - they're not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they can be - but they are hacks for the human mind, ways of manipulating us into particular decisions we otherwise might not make. They are also, in a way, deliberate underminings of the core principle of the free market, which derives its legitimacy from the idea that informed self-interest on aggregate sets appropriate prices for items. The key word is 'informed'; the point of behavioural economics - or rather, of its somewhat buccaneering corporate applications - is to skew our perception of the purchase to the advantage of the company. The overall consequence of that is to tilt the construction of our society away from what it should be if we were making the rational decisions classical economics imagines we would, and towards something else. ~ Nick Harkaway

I mean that the escape of knowledge into the realm of wider society irretrievably alters the nature of our lives. ~ Nick Harkaway

Joe Spork opens the door. The man departs. Joe turns to Polly to say something about how they're obviously not going to Portsmouth, and finds an oyster knife balanced on his cheek, just under his eye.

"Can we be very clear," Polly Cradle murmurs, "that I am not your booby sidekick or your Bond girl? That I am an independent supervillain in my own right?"

Joe swallows. "Yes, we can," he says carefully.

"There will therefore be no more 'Say hello, Polly'?"

"There will not. ~ Nick Harkaway

Perhaps there was another life, not so sad, that I missed somehow this time, and will have in another world. ~ Nick Harkaway

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. ~ Nick Harkaway

Prize lists are out, and you're not on them? Nature of the world - means nothing. Prizes are a lottery. ~ Nick Harkaway

In the brush at the bottom of Master Wu's garden, something snuffles. I do not know whether ninjas snuffle. It seems to me that a very subtle sort of ninja might snuffle so as to make you think he was a neighbourhood dog, or just to let you know he was there and yet leave you guessing. On the other hand, maybe a ninja would regard this kind of trick as amateurish. ~ Nick Harkaway

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

They seemed to believe that the right mixture of Nike, granola and hard work would turn anyone, anywhere in the world, into a millionaire. ~ Nick Harkaway

I'm a bit concerned about you, Jed. If you think Britain looks like a gusset, your girlfriends have been giving you a very strange idea of what sex is all these years."

"Seen from space, Lester. Space. The place where British people do not go because the British space programme is, what, two guys with a really long stick?"

"In that way, Jed, it is very much like US healthcare. ~ Nick Harkaway

We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'. ~ Nick Harkaway

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. ~ Nick Harkaway

Joshua Joseph has no great hatred of modern technology
he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. ~ Nick Harkaway

In a social context, digital technology introduces you to neighbours of the mind - people who are separated by distance, but close to you in thought and interest. ~ Nick Harkaway

Inoue was standing at the point of a spear composed of irate Japanese geeks, and he was pleased to see that the principal reaction on her face was a fizzing, imperious outrage. ~ Nick Harkaway

An ugly calm lay over the streets like the anticipation of a beating. ~ Nick Harkaway

I think the reason I wrote screenplays for nearly a decade was because it was my territory. I could stake that out. ~ Nick Harkaway

We were deluged together in the raw, unbalanced Stuff of the universe. Inevitable consequence:
My own little reification.
I was made flesh, and in the process taken from him. I was never supposed to be real. How terrifying to confide your every doubt to an imaginary companion, to bequeath to him every alternative, and then one day turn and see him standing before you. Gonzo must be feeling so hollow inside, with me spun out and separated from him. It must be quiet and empty in there.
And that, of course, is how I survived being shot. Freshly minted, new, I wasn't real enough to die. ~ Nick Harkaway

It's a Shit Creek tsunami, is what it is. Paddles are no longer the issue. ~ Nick Harkaway

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

I am afraid of falling, of fire, of torture and monsters and infestations of spiders and wild dogs and cancer and the End of the World (a proper one, without a sequel) and everything else I have imagined in the small hours between two and four, when unreasonable, improbable waking nightmares can attain solidity and bulk. I ~ Nick Harkaway

I never engage negatively with reviewers. If someone says something that enrages me, I do what I do on stage. I make a joke about myself and move on. Sometimes people say things that are manifestly wrong or even apparently malicious. That's fine, too. It's a response. ~ Nick Harkaway

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. ~ Nick Harkaway

The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology. ~ Nick Harkaway

The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means. ~ Nick Harkaway

We have a curious relationship with 'funny' in the U.K. We love to laugh, but we also think that making people laugh is just a little bit second-tier, especially in a literary context. ~ Nick Harkaway

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. ~ Nick Harkaway

Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other. ~ Nick Harkaway

Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role ... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences. ~ Nick Harkaway

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

Lemons. He liked lemons. They made you make funny faces when you bit them, and a very, very long way in the future there was a really amazing planet where they'd evolved into people and lived in harmony with a variety of hyper-intelligent bee. Evolution. Thousands and thousands of years of tiny changes could turn little burning sparks of chemistry into people, into monsters and angels and even human beings. ~ Nick Harkaway

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

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. ~ Nick Harkaway

She dances in the water. Perhaps that was as good as life got, after all. ~ Nick Harkaway

Joshua Joseph has no real hatred of modern technology - he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces, and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system ... For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one that deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which humans use to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own little ecosystems. ~ Nick Harkaway

Mr. Pritchard! What are you doing? Is that O-soto-gari? No! It is not! It is a yak mating with a tractor! That is really very very not very good! My grandfather is weeping in Heaven, or he would if there were such a place, which there is not because religion is a mystification contrived by monarchists! Again! Again, and this time do it properly! ~ Nick Harkaway

The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life. ~ 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

Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others: courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of grief. That the state and other systems are precluded from snooping on these things is important - it is a strong barrier between the formal world and the hearth, extended or not - but at root privacy is a simple understanding: not everything belongs to everyone. ~ Nick Harkaway

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

The boy reported - after the Sergeant had slept for a few hours, which was not nearly enough - that YouTube had actually gone down for ten minutes under the weight of traffic. The story was truly global, truly immense: not Obama, not Justin Bieber, not Psy and not Bin Laden had ever touched this, he said. Not Khaled Saeed and not Mohamed Bouazizi, either. If Pippa Middleton and Megan Fox had announced their intention to marry during a live theatrical production of 50 Shades of Grey starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and then taken off their clothes to reveal their bodies tattooed with the text of the eighth Harry Potter novel, they might have approached this level of frenzy. But probably not, the boy said, because not everyone liked Benedict Cumberbatch. ~ Nick Harkaway

Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate. ~ 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

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

Names aren't just coathooks, they're coats. They're the first thing anyone knows about you. ~ Nick Harkaway

His grandfather was scathing about "speculative faith," which is the kind you get from worrying about the possibility that God exists and may be cross with you. Daniel Spork observed that God, if there is one, is well aware of the interior dialogue, and most likely unimpressed by it. Much better, he said, to get on with being the man you are, and hope like buggery that God thinks you did as well as could be expected. Hence all the lessons and strictures concealed in everyday objects. _Learn the shape of the world, know the mind of God._ ~ Nick Harkaway

Real life has no understanding of proper structure," the boy said, "which is why news stories are always made of little lies. ~ 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

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

I grew up on the Roger Moore and Sean Connery Bond movies, so the DNA of my spies is extremely ridiculous and goofy. ~ Nick Harkaway

My scientific qualifications are relatively scant. I like science. I try really hard to educate myself about it, but in the end, if something has to go 'boom,' and it would probably only go 'fwoosh,' I am relatively unconcerned about that, which is a sin, but not, I think, a grave one. ~ Nick Harkaway

He wore his medals. He had a surprising number of them, the real kind, not the ones you got for turning up. Although turning up was no mean thing, some days. ~ Nick Harkaway

Annabelle growls tunelessly, like a bear hibernating on a bassoonist. ~ 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

You must come, Lester," Inoue had said. "You must come! We will cry for this place, but also we will dance the Funky Chicken. ~ 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

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. ~ Nick Harkaway

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. ~ Nick Harkaway

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. ~ Nick Harkaway

Whether you're choosing for yourself or for a character - or for a child - names have baggage of their own. ~ Nick Harkaway

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. ~ Nick Harkaway

Gonzo stares after the Rolls-Royce. He has heroismus interruptus. He was ready, right then, to coordinate four or five hundred terrified civvies, lay down his life, kill for them, make a legend of disinterested soldiering. It's not that he resents what has happened, but he's having trouble changing gear. He was expecting to take charge. Instead he is struggling to keep up with a sexagenarian Mystery Man with an Errol Flynn grin who commands a legion of pirate-monk rally drivers and sweeps formidable older women from their feet in a could of cologne and Asian-Monarchic style. ~ Nick Harkaway

The important thing is that if I can get to it and get back out again without being spotted, it will be a useful study aid in my newly chosen specialist field of getting-the-fuck-out-of-here-ology. ~ 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

I am an avid reader of comics, though I came to them late. ~ Nick Harkaway

Her eyes are very bright. She loves senses, loves the world. He finds that ... admirable, and a bit daunting. I am a mole. I am hiding, in the company of a woman who adores the sunlight and the rain. ~ Nick Harkaway

In the distant past, in what might be described as the Golden Days of War, the business of wreaking havoc on your neighbours (these being the only people you could logistically expect to wreak havoc upon) was uncomplicated. You - the King - pointed at the next-door country and said, "I want me one of those!" Your vassals - stalwart fellows selected for heft and musculature rather than brain - said, "Yes, my liege," or sometimes, "What's in it for me?" but broadly speaking they rode off and burned, pillaged, slaughtered and hacked until either you were richer by a few hundred square miles of forest and farmland, or you were rudely arrested by heathens from the other side who wanted a word in your shell-like ear about cross-border aggression. It was a personal thing, and there was little doubt about who was responsible for kicking it off, because that person was to be found in the nicest room of a big stone house wearing a very expensive hat. ~ Nick Harkaway

The biggest lie was that the world worked the way it was supposed to, and having seen through it, Matthew Spork was free. ~ Nick Harkaway

That's probably why she has added the two severed heads to the uprights of the throne. They lend her an undeniable air of not screwing around. ~ Nick Harkaway

He lounged and exhaled, and felt some small part of himself relax, like the moment when the elastic band on a child's toy plane, wound and wound until the twisting redoubles upon itself and then let go to power the propeller, spasms once and releases that second layer of knots. He ~ Nick Harkaway

He seems an unlikely companion for a woman like Edie Banister, but the world, Daniel once observed, is a great honeycombed thing composed of separated mysteries. ~ Nick Harkaway

It was his experience that one did poorly by involving oneself in matters of local religion. The world looked one way if you believed, and another if you did not, and that was all there was to it. ~ Nick Harkaway

I do not know, at this point, whether Joshua Joseph Spork is the man of my life. He could be. I have given it considerable thought. The jury is still out. The issue between you and me is that you wish to deprive me of the opportunity to find out. Joe Spork is not yours to give or to withhold from me, Mr. Cummerbund. He is mine, until I decide otherwise. You have caused him grief, sullied his name, and you have hurt him. If anyone is going to make him weep, or lie about him, or even do bad things to him, it is me. ~ Nick Harkaway

Crotch biting menace:I have my mouth in close proximity to your genitals.Oh thou man who talks to my mistress over coffee.Do not irk or trifle with me! I possess but one tooth, oh, yes, for the rest were buried long ago in the flesh of sinners.Behold my jaws, upper and lower in righteous, symmetrical poverty.Move not, man of clocks, and heed my mistress, for she cherishes me, even in my foul old age. ~ Nick Harkaway

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