Robert Harris

“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.”

“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.”

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

“The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it - whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust.”

“Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.”

“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.”

“People perish. Books are immortal.”

“Jericho lowered himself carefully to his knees. He covered his eyes and moved his lips like all the others, but he had no faith in any of it. Faith in mathematics, yes; faith in logic, of course; faith in the trajectory of the stars, yes, perhaps. But faith in a God, Christian or otherwise?”

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

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

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