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
swings errors tree
The tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.
sorry love-you forever
I love you forever. I am sorry I cannot love you now.
song loss years
Piracy is robbery with violence, often segueing into murder, rape and kidnapping. It is one of the most frightening crimes in the world. Using the same term to describe a twelve-year-old swapping music with friends, even thousands of songs, is evidence of a loss of perspective so astounding that it invites and deserves the derision it receives.
support answers want
We need to create the institutions that will support the society we want to live in. The only answer is collective action.
life mean ends
And don't tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn't. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with.
retirement real love-you
A woman who can eat a real bruschetta is a woman you can love and who can love you. Someone who pushes the thing away because it's messy is never going to cackle at you toothlessly across the living room of your retirement cottage or drag you back from your sixth heart attack by sheer furious affection. Never happen. You need a woman who isn't afraid of a faceful of olive oil for that.
wine sunshine dark
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 ancient shutters and long, wicked afternoons in a four-poster bed. It's not a wine, it's a life, right there in the glass.
aftermath aware banking painfully sees sensible
The market, as we're all painfully aware in the aftermath of the banking crisis, can be an idiot. It has no perception of right or wrong, or even sensible or insane. It sees profit.
appalling fear horror human war
The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.
great life stories
The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life.
alarm anger challenge complaints deeper government national protect punish quite serious shallow tender
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.
literary mainstream technology
The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.
ask aspire funny great line mine
If you ask who I aspire to, well, if a single line of mine was as funny as P. G. Wodehouse can be, that would be great.
assistant brief few found january quite wrote
After university, I went into film. I started out making tea, managed a brief stint as an assistant director, then found myself writing a screenplay. In the end, I wrote quite a few - but by January 2006, I wanted out.