Author

Happiness is boundlessly weird. Other people's choices often seem to delight them, where I would run screaming.

Sir Terry Pratchett - he was knighted in 2009, and on him it looked earned rather than entitled - wrote about dragons, wizards, turtles, witches, time-travelling monks, and suitcases with legs.

From Nick Harkaway

I make up names for people all the time - it's part of writing. Very often, the name comes with the character, along with of a sense of who they are and what they do.

From Nick Harkaway

In both 'Tigerman' and my first book, 'The Gone-Away World,' there are characters who never really get names. They're too fundamentally who they are to be bound by a name, so I couldn't give them one.

From Nick Harkaway

Names aren't just coathooks, they're coats. They're the first thing anyone knows about you.

From Nick Harkaway

Whether you're choosing for yourself or for a character - or for a child - names have baggage of their own.

From Nick Harkaway

Digital books are still painfully ugly and weirdly irritating to interact with. They look like copies of paper, but they can't be designed or typeset in the same way as paper, and however splendid the cover images may look on a hi-res screen, they're still images rather than physical things.

From 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.

From Nick Harkaway

Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.

From Nick Harkaway

E-readers are uninspired. They're slabs of plastic with fiddly controls and display a badly-formatted, typographically impoverished rendering of a paper book. That's not the electronic book I want. I want a gorgeous physical object, with paper pages, that can transform into any story I choose, perfectly presented on the page.

From Nick Harkaway

Nick Harkaway

Notable Quotes

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