Quotes by Nick Harkaway

About Nick Harkaway:

Nick Harkaway is a novelist and commentator. He is the author of the novels The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker and Tigerman; and a non-fiction study of the digital world, The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Lemons. He liked lemons. They made you make funny faces when you bit them, and a very, very long way in the future there was a really amazing planet where they'd evolved into people and lived in harmony with a variety of hyper-intelligent bee. Evolut...

Nick Harkaway

He things, she realized. He shatters them. They think they've won because he's a bit vague and he waffles, but that only goes so far. It's his shell, like a tortoise, if a tortoise was soft on the outside and dangerous on the inside. That's how the T...

Nick Harkaway

He wondered if today was that day, if he’d wake up different, wake up someone else who remembered him fondly. A new Doctor. He wondered if he’d approve. Would he be more gentle? That might not be so bad. More vengeful? He hoped not. Maybe he’d ...

Nick Harkaway

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

Nick Harkaway

No. The moral of the story in so far as it has one is that cannibals can study logic, and that if you are going to leave the path, you better have your wits about you and know better than to trust the first scary old lady who talks to you in public.

Nick Harkaway

Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.

Nick Harkaway

People don't want children to know what they to know. They want their kids to know what they If you're a teacher you're in a constant battle with mildly deluded adults who think the world will get better if you imagine it better. You want to teach ab...

Nick Harkaway

Now, are those engaged in the business of governing any different by nature from those they govern?" "Yes. They're prideful and tend to sexual misconduct. Also, the situation of being in government tends to drive you mad." "But are they more virtuous...

Nick Harkaway

The sergeants are shunted forward and they blink and stare up at Gonzo as he leans on the edge of his giant mixing bowl. MacArthur never addressed his troops from a mixing bowl--not even one made from a spare geodesic radio emplacement shell--and cer...

Nick Harkaway

You end up with a machine which knows that by its mildest estimate it must have terrible enemies all around and within it, but it can't find them. It therefore deduces that they are well-concealed and expert, likely professional agitators and terrori...

Nick Harkaway

The problem isn't is in charge. It's is in charge. The problem is that people are encouraged to function as . Or, actually, Human emotion and sympathy are They are inappropriate to the exercise of . Everything which makes people good - makes them hum...

Nick Harkaway

Newton's work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for t...

Nick Harkaway

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

Nick Harkaway

Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather more felicitously: the tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.

Nick Harkaway

This place does not feel like my country. It feels like countries I have read about where things are very bad. It feels, in fact, like exactly the kind of thing we were protesting against, but we thought it was elsewhere. It is not heartening to find...

Nick Harkaway

Gonzo's father told his son to grieve without reservation or embarrassment until he could grieve solemnly and inwardly, and then finally to hang up his tears and wear them only occasionally, as befits the true men of the heart. Grief is not a thing t...

Nick Harkaway

What will you tell him?" "The truth." Fortismer thinks about that. "Yes," he says at last. "Probably the best thing. Bloody deceptive, honesty.

Nick Harkaway

Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

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 hover over the expensive Scotch and then the Armagnac, but finally settle on a glass of rich red claret. I put it near my nose and nearly pass out. It smells of old houses and aged wood and dark secrets, but also of hard, hot sunshine through ancie...

Nick Harkaway

Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks - they're not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they can be - but they are hacks fo...

Nick Harkaway

Author Bio

  • NameNick Harkaway
  • DescriptionBritish writer
  • Born1972
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter
  • WorksThe Gone-Away World