Best 68 quotes of Robert Harris on MyQuotes

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.

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.

A police state is a country run by criminals

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

People perish. Books are immortal.

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!

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

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

You find out what you think by talking to yourself.

And the great thing about money is that it doesn’t matter when you harvest it. It’s an all-year crop.

Brave words. Easy to write when one was young and death was still skulking over a distant hill somewhere... - Pg. 82

Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. - Pg. 195

Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.

For them, it was just an ordinary miracle.