Nick Harkaway Quotes

Joe is never sure whether they're mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.

~ Nick Harkaway

Are you addicted if there is simply no reason for you to do anything else?

~ Nick Harkaway

Because for Gonzo, anything which may explode at any moment is clearly a girl.

~ Nick Harkaway

Just got to fnafflebrump caddwallame, all right? Edie says, and no one pays attention. She learned at Lady Gravely's that nonsense which can be misheard is a very good way to lie without getting caught. People just insert whatever they think you must be doing, and - having lied to themselves on your behalf - are disinclined to check up on you.

~ Nick Harkaway

Nowhere have I ever heard of Satan taking the form of an avuncular hippie. No doubt he could. It just seems inefficient.

~ Nick Harkaway

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.

~ Nick Harkaway

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

~ Nick Harkaway

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.

~ Nick Harkaway

At the heart of both democracy and capitalism is a simple assumption that, across the board, people make free and relatively rational decisions: that we are, to borrow a medical term, Gillick Competent.

~ Nick Harkaway

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

~ Nick Harkaway

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.

~ Nick Harkaway

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

~ Nick Harkaway

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.

~ Nick Harkaway

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.

~ Nick Harkaway

Peace is not a state - it is a choice, and you have to remake it every day. It's possible to get a sort of stability, a habit of peace, but it's like an egg balanced, spinning, on its point: lose your momentum, and your equilibrium is gone, too.

~ Nick Harkaway

The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us.

~ Nick Harkaway