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The Ghost QUOTES

The Ghost QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

2 " 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. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

3 " 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. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

4 " 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. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

5 " Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

6 " A crock of shit,” Rick had called it. But actually this was worse. Shit, to quote Gore Vidal, has its own integrity. This was a crock of nothing. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

7 " Travel is sold as freedom, but we were about as free as lab rats. This is how they'll manage the next Holocaust, I thought, as I shuffled forward in my stockinged feet: they'll simply issue us with air tickets and we'll do whatever we're told "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

8 " You may object that this was corny, but don't forget that (a) corn sells by the ton, (b) that I only had two weeks to rework an entire manuscript, and (c) that it sure a hell was a lot better than starting with the derivation of the name Lang. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

9 " I read a lot of bad books- books so bad that they aren't even published,which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published."
- The Ghost, Robert Harris. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

10 " So,” said Ruth, “how bad is it?” “You haven’t read it?” “Not all of it.” “Well,” I said, politely, “it needs some work.” “How much?” The words “Hiroshima” and “nineteen forty-five” floated briefly into my mind. “It’s fixable,” I said, which I suppose it was: even Hiroshima was fixed eventually. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

11 " In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

12 " On the Richter scale of bad ideas, this had to be a ten. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

13 " like interviewing a new cleaner. Do you want someone who can give you the history of cleaning and the theory of cleaning, or do you want someone who’ll just get down and clean your fucking house? They chose you because they think you’ll clean their fucking house. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

14 " What fascinates people isn't policy- who cares about policy? What fascinates people is always people- the detail of another person's life. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

15 " A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and immediately it becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it's halfway to being just like every other bloody book that's sver been written. But the best must never be allowed to drive out the good. In the absence of genius there is always craftmanship. One can at least try to write something that will encourage them, after reading the first paragraph, to take a look at the second, and then the third. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

16 " I mean, take for instance all this civil liberties crap. You know what I’d do if I were in power again? I’d say, okay then, we’ll have two queues at the airports. On the left, we’ll have queues to flights on which we’ve done no background checks on the passengers, no profiling, no biometric data, nothing that infringed anyone’s precious civil liberties, used no intelligence obtained under torture—nothing. On the right, we’ll have queues to the flights where we’ve done everything possible to make them safe for passengers. Then people can make their own minds up which plane they want to catch. Wouldn’t that be great? To sit back and watch which queue the Rycarts of this world would really choose to put their kids on, if the chips were down? "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

17 " Everybody tends to heighten his own reality. We start with a private fantasy about our lives and perhaps one day, for fun, we turn it into an anecdote. No harm is done. Over the years, the anecdote is repeated so regularly it becomes accepted as a fact. Quite soon, to contradict this fact would be embarrassing. In time, we probably come to believe it was true all along. And by these slow accretions of myth, like a coral reef, the historical record takes shape. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

18 " This is the trouble with internet research, in my experience. The proportion of what’s useful to what’s dross dwindles very quickly, and suddenly it’s like searching for something dropped down the back of a sofa and coming up with handfuls of old coins, buttons, fluff, and sucked sweets. What’s important is to ask the right question, and "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

19 " The line between accident and suicide isn't always clearly defined. You could kill yourself without really making up your mind. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost

20 " I decided that the ten percent of the population who worry about these things would be appalled by the report, assuming they ever managed to locate it. The remaining ninety would probably just shrug. "

― Robert Harris , The Ghost