Robert harris quotes

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

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

Working 14 hours a day until you're 55 and missing your kids growing up is not what I would consider a recipe for happiness.

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

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.

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

People perish. Books are immortal.

My greatest regret as a writer is that I've never been able to include as many jokes as I'd like.

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

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

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

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

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

That young man seeks opportunities to test his principles as readily as a drunk picks fights in a bar.

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.

But only a fool sails into combat with nature

For me, as I suspect for most people, there comes a point where you have enough. If you've got £20 million, why keep going until you've got £100 million or £1,000 million? Does anyone need another vast yacht or private jet or a house full of gold?

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.

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.

I've always just wanted to earn my living by writing. The best thing is to go into my study in the morning and stay there and put words together.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.

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

One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They're too big, too fast. I think that's quite scary.

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

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.

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 financial world is at the cutting edge of high technology.

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

A police state is a country run by criminals

Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.

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

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

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

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.

Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men's souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses? Boring? You might as well say that life itself is boring!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Storytelling has a narcotic power.

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

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

You find out what you think by talking to yourself.

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.