Robert Harris Quotes

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.

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

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

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

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.

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

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

My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

You find out what you think by talking to yourself.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

A police state is a country run by criminals

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

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

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

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.

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.

Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?