Quotes from Nick Harkaway

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

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.

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.

My reading of history is that we continually inherit trouble.

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.

My books are written from the heart, to entertain: they're books I would like to read. Because of that, when I meet people who like them, we have so much to talk about!

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

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

I'm caught somewhere between introversion and extroversion. Performance is natural to me, joyful, but it is also exhausting. I can feed on it, but the expense is high, too, like being a carnivore: I have to chase down my meals.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I have wrangles with Facebook, entered fictitious trips because I can't get the map to get off my page, don't want people to know where I live. It is possible to carve out a space that's your own.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

In both 'Tigerman' and my first book, 'The Gone-Away World,' there are characters who never really get names. They're too fundamentally who they are to be bound by a name, so I couldn't give them one.

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.