English - Novelist | 1972 -
We have a curious relationship with 'funny' in the U.K. We love to laugh, but we also think that making people laugh is just a little bit second-tier, especially in a literary context.
Nick Harkaway
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Happiness is boundlessly weird. Other people's choices often seem to delight them, where I would run screaming.
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I make up names for people all the time - it's part of writing. Very often, the name comes with the character, along with of a sense of who they are and what they do.
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In both 'Tigerman' and my first book, 'The Gone-Away World,' there are characters who never really get names. They're too fundamentally who they are to be bound by a name, so I couldn't give them one.
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Names aren't just coathooks, they're coats. They're the first thing anyone knows about you.
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Whether you're choosing for yourself or for a character - or for a child - names have baggage of their own.
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Digital books are still painfully ugly and weirdly irritating to interact with. They look like copies of paper, but they can't be designed or typeset in the same way as paper, and however splendid the cover images may look on a hi-res screen, they're still images rather than physical things.
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To my irritation, you still can't flick through an ebook properly; you can't riffle the pages, you can't look at more than one page at once.
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In abandoning the understanding that things - services, goods, wars, and houses - have costs, we risk becoming infantilised, incapable of making decisions about government or finance, and perhaps above all about the environment, the wellbeing of the planet upon which we depend and which our children will inherit from us.
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Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.
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E-readers are uninspired. They're slabs of plastic with fiddly controls and display a badly-formatted, typographically impoverished rendering of a paper book. That's not the electronic book I want. I want a gorgeous physical object, with paper pages, that can transform into any story I choose, perfectly presented on the page.
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Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature.
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