Quotes from Robert Harris

Everybody tends to heighten his own reality. We start with a private fantasy about our lives and perhaps one day, for fun, we turn it into an anecdote. No harm is done. Over the years, the anecdote is repeated so regularly it becomes accepted as a fact. Quite soon, to contradict this fact would be embarrassing. In time, we probably come to believe it was true all along. And by these slow accretions of myth, like a coral reef, the historical record takes shape.

if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight—start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through.

The Greek philosopher Epictetus recognised this two thousand years ago when he wrote: 'What disturbs and alarms man are not the things but his opinions and fancies about the things.

He lived alone, in a small house full of books, and did nothing all day except read and think—a most dangerous occupation for a man, which in my experience leads invariably to dyspepsia and melancholy

Isn't an awareness of their transience what gives these moments their exquisite edge?

I did not have long to enjoy my freedom in tranquillity. My modest plans, like everyone else's, were about to be mocked by the immensity of events. As Plautus has it: Whatever the mind may hope for The future is in the hands of the gods.

Violence crackled around him in the dry air, like static electricity

It was like having a child forever at your heels - a persistent, intelligent, embarrassing, deceitful, dangerous child

His theory of oratory, the exact opposite of the Asiatics', was simple: don't move about too much, hold your head straight, stick to the point, make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, and when you've won their sympathy, sit down quickly –

A voice came out of the darkness. 'Don't make it so wide. It's not a grave. You're making work for yourself.

Well, well—be careful of what questions you ask, for fear of what answers you may receive.

The foundations of Empire are often occasions of woe; their dismemberment, always.

There are no lasting victories in politics, there is only the remorseless grinding forward of events.

He felt more human with his boots on. A man can face the world with something on his feet.

She didn't say goodbye. She set off up the street, dodging the pedestrians, walking fast. He watched her, waiting to see if she might look back. But of course she didn't. He knew she wouldn't. She wasn't the looking-back kind.

In the concealed darkness of the bag her fingers began to work her rosary, clumsily at first but with increasing dexterity - Push. Click. Slide. Press -

What she needed was someone who would take her for the whole night. Someone decent and respectable, with an apartment of his own. But how could you ever judge what men were really like? It was the young ones with the swaggering walks and the loud mouths who ended up bursting into tears and showing you pictures of their girlfriends. It was the bespectacled bankers and lawyers who liked to knock you around.

he tried to visualise her apartment, but he couldn't do it, he didn't know enough about her.

It was an unnatural time to be awake, ... It meant nothing good. He associated it with emergency, bereavement, conspiracy, flight; the sad skulk away at the end of a one-night affair.

History wasn't made without taking risks, that much he knew. So maybe sometimes you had to take risks to write it, too?

I lay aside the papers. Really, it is beyond hypocrisy; it is beyond even lying: it has become a psychosis.

unfortunately, freedom alone is not enough, by far. If there is a shortage of bread, a shortage of butter and fats, a shortage of textiles, and if housing conditions are bad, freedom will not carry you very far. It is very difficult, comrades, to live on freedom alone.

We are born in a clear field and die in a dark forest.

But it is one of the tricks of the successful politician to be able to hold many things in mind at once and to switch between them as the need arises;