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
An important part of the Internet is that it provides a space for people whose identities are socially unacceptable. If it enables someone who feels minoritised to be who they want to be, it’s actually worth having other people be offensive. I’d much rather have both than have neither. – Nick Harkaway
Peace is not a state – it is a choice, and you have to remake it every day. It’s possible to get a sort of stability, a habit of peace, but it’s like an egg balanced, spinning, on its point: lose your momentum, and your equilibrium is gone, too. – 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
My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler. – Nick Harkaway
Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player. – Nick Harkaway
I’m not an absolutist about free speech. Intellectually, I believe that most of the time it’s better to let things get said, argue them, and put lies and stupidities to rest. Practically, I know that newspapers rarely issue corrections with the same prominence they give to denouncements – and Twitter, by its nature, never does. – Nick Harkaway
I’m a novelist: I spend a great part of my day pretending to myself that I’m in a different world, being a different person, faced with decisions I pretend I haven’t created. – Nick Harkaway
Google’s library plan was staggering and exciting – it wasn’t the idea I objected to, but the method. – Nick Harkaway
Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature. – Nick Harkaway
If you ask who I aspire to, well, if a single line of mine was as funny as P. G. Wodehouse can be, that would be great. – Nick Harkaway
Whether you’re choosing for yourself or for a character – or for a child – names have baggage of their own. – Nick Harkaway
I’m an irredeemable urbanite. I can’t imagine living more than a five-minute walk from my fellow human beings. Other people are vital to my peace of mind. – Nick Harkaway
Digital books are still painfully ugly and weirdly irritating to interact with. They look like copies of paper, but they can’t be designed or typeset in the same way as paper, and however splendid the cover images may look on a hi-res screen, they’re still images rather than physical things. – Nick Harkaway
I’m a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn’t be disenfranchised if I tried. – Nick Harkaway
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. – Nick Harkaway
I make up names for people all the time – it’s part of writing. Very often, the name comes with the character, along with of a sense of who they are and what they do. – 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
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. – Nick Harkaway
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. – 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
I wrote the first draft of ‘Tigerman’ while my wife was pregnant – needless to say, I was relaxed and casual about her well-being during this tender time – and the novel clearly has its center in that panicked parental desperation that accompanies a first child and in the admittedly comedic extremes to which it drives us. – Nick Harkaway
At the heart of both democracy and capitalism is a simple assumption that, across the board, people make free and relatively rational decisions: that we are, to borrow a medical term, Gillick Competent. – 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
The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology. – 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
I studied revolutions at university, and I think each revolution must begin with a moment of ‘no.’ If enough people have that moment at the same time, it becomes a movement. – Nick Harkaway