Robert Harris Quotes

Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and simply to start.

The true currency of life is time, not money, and we've all got a limited stock of that.

It is perseverance, and not genius that takes a man to the top. Rome is full of unrecognized geniuses. Only perseverance enables you to move forward in the world.

History is too important to be left to the historians.

Cicero smiled at us. 'The art of life is to deal with problems as they arise, rather than destory one's spirit by worrying about them too far in advance. Especially tonight.

What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason

You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.

First comes an idea. Then, characters begin to evolve out of the landscape of that idea. And then, finally, characters dominate: plot is simply a function of what these people might do or be. Everything has to flow from their personalities; otherwise it will not be emotionally engaging, or plausible.

Politics is never a victory, it's just the remorseless grinding forward of events.

But clever people all make one mistake. They all think everyone else is stupid. And everyone isn't stupid. They just take a bit more time, that's all.

If one first gives himself to the Lord, all other giving is easy.

Storytelling has a narcotic power.

Cicero most reminds me of Harold Wilson. Both men knew how to keep the show on the road.

Golf requires only a few simple Rules and Regulations to guide the players in the true nature of its sporting appeal. The spirit of the game is its own referee.

It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you're forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.

You find out what you think by talking to yourself.

You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.

Their souls were contagious. ... Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them.

You can't ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can't repeal human nature.

History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.

If long hitting is the thing that causes the spectators to whistle through their teeth in wonderment, why not play tournaments up and down an expansive stadium?

To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.

What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them!

Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?

By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.