Nick Harkaway Quotes

And don't tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn't. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with.

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

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

There was a small, quiet moment, the kind you just have time to notice, which makes you feel sad for no good reason.

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

I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf.

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

Nowhere have I ever heard of Satan taking the form of an avuncular hippie. No doubt he could. It just seems inefficient.

I am Nemesis, meting out just deserts

Faith has always struck him as either a tremendous gift or an appalling deception, depending on whether there's a God or not.

The game is fixed. Alwayas has been, always will be, and the only way out for a man is the gangster's road.

All my characters are me, in one way or another.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn't tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began.

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

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

When the time comes to work, I work.

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

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

I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried.

Dead like slipped on a bar of soap or like Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead piping?

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

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

Joe is never sure whether they're mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.

You need to relax and be yourself, not whoever it is you're trying to be in your mad little head. I bloody don't, though. I'm me and I'm good at it.

If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.

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

Bollocks to should.

Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.

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

I'm really sorry I ate your dog.

The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.

I thought about my personal version of heaven, which is small and calm and features only one angel, who cannot sing.

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

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.

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

The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it's so hard to do just one.

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

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.

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'.

Executive power in any nation arguably has more in common with executive power in another country than with the citizens it should serve.

I'm fascinated by human agency - by the process of decision, both in the individual and the mass.

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.

I don't do a lot of research, exactly, but I'm constantly wandering through the world finding things incredible and remembering them.

Never mind, never mind, let's get to the part where we smite the unrighteous. I've brought my most alarming teeth!

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

'Tigerman' was born in the front seat of a Hilux SUV on the road north out of Chiang Mai.

He'd never prove it, and if he did there'd be nothing he could do about it. But it would be true, and that was something.

Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.

Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it.

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

Soot and sorrow: the Night Market's invocation of desperate seriousness, of doom and disaster.

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.

This is the world, he thought. And I am in it.

My wife runs the charity Reprieve, and so rendition, droning, and capital punishment are very much the topics of our dinner table because of that.

Thus Gonzo, incendiarist and leader of men.

My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler.

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

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

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

Don't fuck around thinking you could have done it better. There is no better. There's just not being dead.

Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work.

I can show him how to be the right kind of stupid.

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.

I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes.

It's not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic, it's that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is.

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

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

My reading of history is that we continually inherit trouble.

I know that when I talk to my parents and my friends, there's a strong feeling of the world out of control and damaged.

Bones were not strong just because they were the strongest thing a human body had.

Knowledge is not just power - it is control.

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.

Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.

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

A warsheep would be a cross between a dolphin and a small, limber elephant.

When your friend is decomposing, surely you owe it to them to inhale their death. To do otherwise seems impossible prim.

He wondered if he should try to talk to the boy like that. Perhaps the boy wondered why he didn't. But they had silence, and not many people had that.

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

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

Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing.

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

Nature intended in her design a hearty life of toil, open fires and plump old age attended by a brood of sun-touched brats.

Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature.

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.

I love you forever. I am sorry I cannot love you now.

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

Happiness is boundlessly weird. Other people's choices often seem to delight them, where I would run screaming.