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.

People perish. Books are immortal.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

Storytelling has a narcotic power.

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?

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.

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

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

Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

History is too important to be left to the historians.

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

But only a fool sails into combat with nature

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.

You find out what you think by talking to yourself.

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.

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

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.

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.