Robert Harris (novelist) Quotes

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

We live in an age of great jitteriness in the financial markets. And there's no doubt at all, I thin...

Social mores change all the time. In the mid-1970s, it would've been astonishing, say, to see two me...

I am sure future historians will say the biggest and most astonishing change in politics has been th...

A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions a...

If one tries to think about history, it seems to me - it's like looking at a range of mountains. And...

...he possessed for attractive form of courage: bravery of a nervous man. After all, any rash fool c...

And then to my surprise in one of them I discovered the original manuscript of On Friendship. Puzzle...

The trouble with Lucious," he said, putting his feet up on the desk after this cousin has gone," is ...

To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose...

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

Outwardly, I hope, I wear my usual mask of detachment, even irony, for there has never been a situat...

...it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the ...

Officially it was almost spring but someone had forgotten to pass the news on to winter.

Jericho lowered himself carefully to his knees. He covered his eyes and moved his lips like all the ...

Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heighte...

People perish. Books are immortal.

The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it - wh...

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

For them, it was just an ordinary miracle.

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

Nature has granted man no better gift than the shortness of life. The senses grow dull, the limbs ar...

Brave words. Easy to write when one was young and death was still skulking over a distant hill somew...

Right, you see that girl over there, the one in that group that keeps looking right at you?'...'Righ...

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – t...

A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and...

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

....let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty...

Having the urge to write a novel, especially if you've yet to be published, is like having a medical...