Author

An important part of the Internet is that it provides a space for people whose identities are socially unacceptable. If it enables someone who feels minoritised to be who they want to be, it's actually worth having other people be offensive. I'd much rather have both than have neither.

From Nick Harkaway

The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.

From Nick Harkaway

In a novel, even if you put a country in the wrong hemisphere, which I've done, I can always claim it was part of the additional weirdness of the story.

From Nick Harkaway

I wrote the first draft of 'Tigerman' while my wife was pregnant - needless to say, I was relaxed and casual about her well-being during this tender time - and the novel clearly has its center in that panicked parental desperation that accompanies a first child and in the admittedly comedic extremes to which it drives us.

From Nick Harkaway

As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.

From Nick Harkaway

I'm not an absolutist about free speech. Intellectually, I believe that most of the time it's better to let things get said, argue them, and put lies and stupidities to rest. Practically, I know that newspapers rarely issue corrections with the same prominence they give to denouncements - and Twitter, by its nature, never does.

From 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.

From Nick Harkaway

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.

From Nick Harkaway

The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.

From Nick Harkaway

Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.

From Nick Harkaway

Nick Harkaway

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