Nick Harkaway

The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.

The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible.

The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.

Another thing that freaks me out is time. Time is like a book. You have a beginning, a middle and an end. It's just a cycle.

It took me realizing that a broken heart has never actually killed anyone to find the courage to ask for what I want, in just about every situation. That was part of my own growing up.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.