Quotes by Nick Harkaway - Page 3 | QuoteForever

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Cheese is good. And Britain, despite the grumblings of the French and the outrage of the Swiss, not to mention some plucky challenges from Italy, Austria, and Spain, has some of the best cheese in the world. We're world leaders in cheese.
Nick Harkaway / Novelist
Austria
Britain
Cheese
Despite
Outrage
Spain
Swiss
Best Good World
Italy
Mention
World Leaders
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In the span of a human lifetime, and well within the collective memory, Britain went from a stable imperial power ruling an appreciable fraction of the Earth's surface to being a tumultuous patchwork which was at least superficially in decline.
Nick Harkaway / Novelist
Britain
Decline
Lifetime
Ruling
Stable
Collective
Fraction
Imperial
Span
Tumultuous
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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 / Novelist
Peace
Balanced
Equilibrium
Gone
Habit
Momentum
Spinning
Stability
Like
Get
Choice
Every
Possible
State
Too
Day
Egg
Every Day
Sort
Remake
Lose
Point
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No. The moral of the story in so far as it has one is that cannibals can study logic, and that if you are going to leave the path, you better have your wits about you and know better than to trust the first scary old lady who talks to you in public.
Nick Harkaway / Novelist
Path
Scary
Stories
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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 / Novelist
Fiction
Including
Novel
Serious
Benefit
Nor
Suspect
Wary
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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 / Novelist
Edges
Manic
Parent
Subtle
Wiring
Sentinel
Sharp
Terminated
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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.
Nick Harkaway / Novelist
Adopting
Ancient
Capacity
Cease
Fancy
Greece
Opinion
Perspective
Literate
Written Down
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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 / Novelist
Malicious
Response
Reviewers
Myself Me People
Apparently
Move On
Negatively
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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.
Nick Harkaway / Novelist
Ephemeral
Hot
Pie
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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 / Novelist
Offensive
Enables
Identities
Important Part
Neither
Provides
Socially
Unacceptable
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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 / Novelist
Educate
Qualifications
Sin
Unconcerned
Boom
Grave
In The End
Scant
Scientific
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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.
Nick Harkaway / Novelist
Appeals
Mainstream
Understood
Consumer
Identities
Item
Mapped
Perfectly
Recent
Recent Years
Sold
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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 / Novelist
Copies
Digital
Irritating
Splendid
Cover
Designed
Images
Interact
Painfully
Weirdly
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The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us.
Nick Harkaway / Novelist
Anger
Complaints
Deeper
Protect
Rude
Serious
Shallow
Alarm
Certainties
Rituals
Motivations
National
Punish
Sensibilities
Tender
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Newton's work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future.
Nick Harkaway / Novelist
Body
Discovery
May
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I am the world's most appalling martial artist. I am so bad. I've studied jujitsu, kickboxing, t'ai chi. Once, I was sparring with someone, made a mistake, and managed to knock them down. I was so shocked that I dropped to my knees to see if they were all right, and then they knocked me out cold. From the floor.
Nick Harkaway / Novelist
Shocked
Sparring
World I Am Me
Appalling
Chi
World Me I Am
Dropped
Floor
Martial
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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 / Novelist
Decision
People
Thinking
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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 / Novelist
Finance
Goods
Incapable
Making Decisions
Wellbeing
Government Will Children
Abandoning
Wars
Houses
Inherit
Services
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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 / Novelist
Casual
Comedic
Desperation
Extremes
Parental
Pregnant
Relaxed
Well Being
Accompanies
Admittedly
Center
Clearly
Draft
Drives
First Child
Needless
Panicked
Tender
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Booksellers are tied to publishing - they need conventional publishing models to continue - but for those companies, that's not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can't afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market.
Nick Harkaway / Novelist
Advertising
Conventional
Google
Hardware
Infrastructure
Models
Sells
Tied
Afford
Apple
Case
Companies
Market
Publisher
Route
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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 / Novelist
Democracy
Desire
Secret
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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 / Novelist
Display
Gorgeous
Pages
Plastic
Rendering
Uninspired
Electronic
Impoverished
Object
Page
Perfectly
Presented
Transform
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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 / Novelist
Corrections
Free Speech
Newspapers
Prominence
Nature Time Believe
Practically
Intellectually
Rarely
Stupidities
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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.
Nick Harkaway / Novelist
Loss
Song
Years
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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.
Nick Harkaway / Novelist
Dark
Sunshine
Wine
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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 / Novelist
Love You
Real
Retirement
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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.
Nick Harkaway / Novelist
Exercise
Machines
People
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People don't want children to know what they need to know. They want their kids to know what they ought to need to know. If you're a teacher you're in a constant battle with mildly deluded adults who think the world will get better if you imagine it is better. You want to teach about sex? Fine, but only when they're old enough to do it. You want to talk politics? Sure, but nothing modern. Religion? So long as you don't actually think about it. Otherwise some furious mob will come to your house and burn you for a witch.
Nick Harkaway / Novelist
Teacher
Children
Sex
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