Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Society is based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being continually dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything.

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.

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

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.

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.

Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, our financial industry and governments leaned on a snake-oil mirage of wealth creation, a bubble predicated on the obvious falsehood that things could only get better.

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

My dad and I compete on the pool table; that's the most important competition of our lives. The fact that I'm writing and it works for me is one of the great joys for him. We talk about writing, and it's great.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I do public appearances. I'm bluff, hearty, goofy. I wear loud clothes, and I read the funny bits. I occasionally get taken to task for one thing or another, and I acknowledge my fault, my flaw, my failure, and I move on.

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.

With true free speech has to come an understanding of when and when not to use it. But you can't legislate that. It must be voluntary - especially in a world where a whisper can reach a million people in an eye blink.