Robert Harris

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

“Leaders today are isolated by phalanxes of body guards. It's profoundly undemocratic, the way they have used terrorism as a means to protect themselves.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“Storytelling has a narcotic power.”

“You find out what you think by talking to yourself.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Within reason, I can write what I like and spend as long doing it as is necessary. That is a luxury beyond price.”

“A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader, and will therefore open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience.”

“And then to my surprise in one of them I discovered the original manuscript of On Friendship. Puzzled, I unrolled it, thinking I must have brought it with me by mistake. But when I saw that Cicero had copied out at the top of the roll in his shaking hand a quotation from the text, on the importance of having friends, I realised it was a parting gift: If a man ascended into heaven and gazed upon the whole workings of the universe and the beauty of the stars, the marvellous sight would give him no joy if he had to keep it to himself. And yet, if only there had been someone to describe the spectacle to, it would have filled him with delight. Nature abhors solitude.”

“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.”