Quotes from Nick Harkaway

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

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.

Revolutions come in two stages: the bit where everything gets smashed and the bit where you have to build it again. The first is great fun; the second is so very hard.

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

In a social context, digital technology introduces you to neighbours of the mind - people who are separated by distance, but close to you in thought and interest.

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.

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.

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

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.

As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The Brit abroad is always the voice of caution. Persons of other cultures are known to be undisciplined, prone to leaning out of car windows and cooking with garlic.

Victorian theorists competed to identify how many biologically differentiated races lived on Earth and proposed inherent characteristics for them, formulated explanations for these presumed variations in humanity.

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.

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

The reason steampunk attracts people is that it is premised on a technology which is visible and pleasing to the naked eye, and whose moving parts are comprehensible on a human scale.

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