Robert Harris Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Robert Harris:

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.

My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.

Robert Harris

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

Robert Harris

Having the urge to write a novel, especially if you've yet to be published, is like having a medical condition impossible to mention in polite company - it's a relief simply to know there are fellow-sufferers out there.

Robert Harris

I like to take people you wouldn't really think people would write novels about: an aqueduct engineer, a code-breaker, a hedge-fund manager. It's in those sorts of lives that I find more fascination than in a CIA operative or a Marine or something like that.

Robert Harris

Writers of fiction should stick to writing, not pop up on panel shows or as a talking head.

Robert Harris

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

Robert Harris

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

Robert Harris

There's nothing more interesting than the details of someone's life.

Robert Harris

Social mores change all the time. In the mid-1970s, it would've been astonishing, say, to see two men holding hands in the streets. And the attitude to having a fling with a girl, or whatever, was quite different then.

Robert Harris

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

Robert Harris

Writing a novel - unlike operating a piece of heavy machinery, say, or cooking a chicken - is not a skill that can be taught. There is no standard way of doing it, just as there is no means of telling, while you're doing it, whether you're doing it well or badly. And merely because you've done it well once doesn't mean you can do it well again.

Robert Harris

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.

Robert Harris

One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present.

Robert Harris

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.

Robert Harris

Unlike the Holocaust, Stalin's murders are forgotten: dust blowing in the wind.

Robert Harris

You know, you can be really quite subversive in popular fiction, which is capable of taking on big issues of politics, war, the rise and fall of commercial dynasties.

Robert Harris

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

Robert Harris

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

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

Robert Harris

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

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

I can't get very excited about the House of Commons these days because I don't feel the power is there. What is really bizarre is that you sense it is not in Washington either. It is now very hard even to locate the levers of power, let alone to pull them and change things.

Robert Harris

I used to love politics. I can't say I do any more. All the fun has gone out of it. Each side is engaged in this trench warfare of managerialism. They're all too scared to say anything that might make them appear something other than completely bland.

Robert Harris