17 Quotes by Robert Harris

It was like having a child forever at your heels - a persistent, intelligent, embarrassing, deceitful, dangerous child

How odd it is, thought March afterwards, to live your life in ignorance of the past, of your world, yourself. Yet how easy to do it! You went along from day to day, down paths other people had prepared for you, never raising your head - enfolded in their logic, from swaddling clothes to shroud. It was a kind of fear. Well, goodbye to that. And good to leave it behind - whatever happened now. - 214

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.

From the Latin, con clavis: 'with a key'.

All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books - books so bad they aren't even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published.And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don't ring true. I'm not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you're reading it.

Caesar is a different category of man altogether. Pompey merely wants to rule the world. Caesar longs to smash it to pieces and remake it in his own image.

Anyone found not enjoying themselves will be shot.

But the point is, it won't pass. You can't isolate it from the rest. It's there in the mix. And if the anti-Semitism is evil, it's all evil Because if they're capable of that, they're capable of anything.