1.
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.
Robert Harris
2.
People perish. Books are immortal.
Robert Harris
3.
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.
Robert Harris
4.
The true currency of life is time, not money, and we've all got a limited stock of that.
Robert Harris
5.
You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.
Robert Harris
6.
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.
Robert Harris
7.
Politics is never a victory, it's just the remorseless grinding forward of events.
Robert Harris
8.
Their souls were contagious. ... Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them.
Robert Harris
9.
Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.
Robert Harris
10.
If one first gives himself to the Lord, all other giving is easy.
Robert Harris
11.
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.
Robert Harris
12.
The financial world is at the cutting edge of high technology.
Robert Harris
13.
The natural impulse of men is to follow and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate.
Robert Harris
14.
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.
Robert Harris
15.
By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.
Robert Harris
16.
My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.
Robert Harris
17.
To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.
Robert Harris
18.
You can't ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can't repeal human nature.
Robert Harris
19.
If you spend too long trying to avoid death, you will be dead in at least one way.
Robert Harris
20.
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.
Robert Harris
21.
Cicero most reminds me of Harold Wilson. Both men knew how to keep the show on the road.
Robert Harris
22.
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.
Robert Harris
23.
You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.
Robert Harris
24.
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
Robert Harris
25.
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?
Robert Harris
26.
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.
Robert Harris
27.
Storytelling has a narcotic power.
Robert Harris
28.
What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them!
Robert Harris
29.
Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?
Robert Harris
30.
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.
Robert Harris
31.
I write as well as I can. I'm a journalist at heart, so it's the story that matters.
Robert Harris
32.
History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.
Robert Harris
33.
Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.
Robert Harris
34.
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.
Robert Harris
35.
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?
Robert Harris
36.
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.
Robert Harris
37.
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.
Robert Harris
38.
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.
Robert Harris
39.
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!
Robert Harris
40.
I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.
Robert Harris
41.
History is too important to be left to the historians.
Robert Harris
42.
[Boxer is] the ultimate tool for the serious pro' that can't afford the time and patience to mess around with lesser products.
Robert Harris
43.
But only a fool sails into combat with nature
Robert Harris
44.
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.
Robert Harris
45.
You find out what you think by talking to yourself.
Robert Harris
46.
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.
Robert Harris
47.
It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.
Robert Harris
48.
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.
Robert Harris
49.
If you go back, 'The Great Gatsby' would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business.
Robert Harris
50.
I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.
Robert Harris