Robert Harris Quotes - Page 2

If you spend too long trying to avoid death, you will be dead in at least one way.

The natural impulse of men is to follow and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate.

In a way I'm almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.

The financial world is at the cutting edge of high technology.

I write as well as I can. I'm a journalist at heart, so it's the story that matters.

Another of Cicero's maxims was that if you must do something unpopular, you might as well do it wholeheartedly, for in politics there is no credit to be won by timidity.

In a generation or two, or maybe sooner, young golfers of true sporting instinct will wonder why all this handling of the ball is necessary. It will seem to them that the game is not as good as it might be.

But only a fool sails into combat with nature

Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.

People perish. Books are immortal.

I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.

To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

Humans have changed little over time. We think we've invented the modern world but they were making better speeches 2,000 years ago and grappling with issues of empire and terrorism.

If you go back, 'The Great Gatsby' would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business.

I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.

Tape is the archiving champ and has been for decades. Reliable, less expensive than disks and available in large-scale robotic systems that store petabytes.

I think it's very, very hard not to go slightly crazy if you're in the top in politics, especially if you're there for a long time.

Everyone thinks politics will just go on the way it is. I don't agree.

[Boxer is] the ultimate tool for the serious pro' that can't afford the time and patience to mess around with lesser products.

Don't try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours.

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

A police state is a country run by criminals

It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.

It's when you've stopped writing and are doing other things, especially when you're asleep, that the real work is done.

Egyptologists, skilled in piecing together the papyri of lost civilisations, suddenly discovered that the same talent could be applied to working out the pattern of German radio traffic.