Robert Harris quotes:

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

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

If one tries to think about history, it seems to me - it's like looking at a range of mountains. And the first time you see them, they look one way. But then time changes, the pattern of light shifts. Maybe you've moved slightly, your perspective has changed. The mountains are the same, but they look very different.

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.

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

A police state is a country run by criminals

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.

We live in an age of great jitteriness in the financial markets. And there's no doubt at all, I think, that the volume of computer-traded stocks has helped contribute to that.

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 find out what you think by talking to yourself.

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

I am sure future historians will say the biggest and most astonishing change in politics has been the embracing of all the tenets of Thatcherism by the party of Keir Hardie: trade union legislation, Europe, the replacement of Trident, 10 per cent tax for people who have made millions from their companies.

Cut your manuscript ruthlessly but never throw anything away: it's amazing how often a discarded scene or description, which wouldn't fit in one place, will work perfectly later.

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

My father left school at 14, my mother at 13. My father was clever and well-read. He took a newspaper, always watched the news, discussed it all the time.

The only thing you can be sure of, Herr March, is that - whoever wins - still standing when the smoke of battle clears will be the banks of the cantons of Switzerland.

My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.

I see myself as the literary equivalent of a skilled lathe-operator, or a basket-weaver; a potter, maybe: I make mildly diverting objects that people want to buy.

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.

She had the resigned indifference of extreme old age. Buildings and empires rose and fell. It snowed. It stopped snowing. People came and went. One day death would come for her, and she would not find that surprising either, and she would not care -

People will perish, but books are immortal. (Pompeii)

We say, 'The market plummets,' like it's some roaring creature.

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.

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.

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.

For them, it was just an ordinary miracle.

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.

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.

Writers and journalists tend to be simplistic about politics when, like all other areas of life, it's more complicated.

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

I think a lot of us feel, when we look at the Dow Jones plunging, alienated - you do feel as if we're in the grip of some alien force that slipped human control.

Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

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.

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.

Storytelling has a narcotic power.

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

My parents were interested in history and the world. My father read Graham Greene and Georges Simenon and was a strong trade unionist and Labour supporter.

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

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.

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

It's easy enough to get into power. You can make promises and try to be all things to all people. But the moment you have to make decisions, you're going to annoy at least half of them. Whatever you do, in the end you're almost certain to be brought down by your own character traits.

The financial markets tend to be just a backdrop for a novel, for a heist or something that isn't necessarily integral to it. On the whole, I don't think the financial world has been well served by novels.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

History is too important to be left to the historians.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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 put words together.

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

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.

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

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

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 make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.