Nick Harkaway
Nick Harkaway
Nick Harkawayis 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...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Nick Harkaway quotes about
feeling talk
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.
hard
Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it.
bubble early falsehood industry mirage obvious throughout
Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, our financial industry and governments leaned on a snake-oil mirage of wealth creation, a bubble predicated on the obvious falsehood that things could only get better.
To my irritation, you still can't flick through an ebook properly; you can't riffle the pages, you can't look at more than one page at once.
The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means.
appalling dropped knees knock knocked martial shocked sparring studied
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.
changes food gets house kids manic might parent people poor sentinel sharp subtle threat
Being a parent is weird. It changes people in subtle and unsubtle ways. In my case, it awoke a kind of manic sentinel in my brain. Anything in the house that might be a threat to the kids or to my wife gets terminated - food, sharp edges, poor wiring.
time work
When the time comes to work, I work.
legislate million people reach speech understanding voluntary whisper
With true free speech has to come an understanding of when and when not to use it. But you can't legislate that. It must be voluntary - especially in a world where a whisper can reach a million people in an eye blink.
attracts human naked parts people pleasing reason technology visible whose
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.
arguably citizens common country executive power
Executive power in any nation arguably has more in common with executive power in another country than with the citizens it should serve.
nearly stake wrote
I think the reason I wrote screenplays for nearly a decade was because it was my territory. I could stake that out.
brooding
I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired.
enormous room underneath work
I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf.