Robert Harris Quotes

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.

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.

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

My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

A police state is a country run by criminals

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?

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

But only a fool sails into combat with nature

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

Storytelling has a narcotic power.

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