Quotes from Robert Harris

To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.

Having the urge to write a novel, especially if you've yet to be published, is like having a medical condition impossible to mention in polite company - it's a relief simply to know there are fellow-sufferers out there.

My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.

Social mores change all the time. In the mid-1970s, it would've been astonishing, say, to see two men holding hands in the streets. And the attitude to having a fling with a girl, or whatever, was quite different then.

Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

Egyptologists, skilled in piecing together the papyri of lost civilisations, suddenly discovered that the same talent could be applied to working out the pattern of German radio traffic.

It's when you've stopped writing and are doing other things, especially when you're asleep, that the real work is done.

You know, you can be really quite subversive in popular fiction, which is capable of taking on big issues of politics, war, the rise and fall of commercial dynasties.