I am sure future historians will say the biggest and most astonishing change in politics has been the embracing of all the tenets of Thatcherism by the party of Are Hardin: trade union legislation, Europe, the replacement of Trident, 10 percent tax for people who have made millions from their companies.

— Robert Harris

If one tries to think about history, it seems to me - it's like looking at a range of mountains. And the first time you see them, they look one way. But then time changes, the pattern of light shifts. Maybe you've moved slightly, your perspective has changed. The mountains are the same, but they look very different.

— Robert Harris

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

— Robert Harris

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

— Robert Harris

Jericho lowered himself carefully to his knees. He covered his eyes and moved his lips like all the others, but he had no faith in any of it. Faith in mathematics, yes; faith in logic, of course; faith in the trajectory of the stars, yes, perhaps. But faith in a God, Christian or otherwise?

— Robert Harris

....let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end........ Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.

— Robert Harris

Nature has granted man no better gift than the shortness of life. The senses grow dull, the limbs are numb, sight, bearing, gait, even the teeth and alimentary organs die before we do, and yet this period is reckoned a portion of life." - Pg. 82

— Robert Harris

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

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

— Robert Harris

Outwardly, I hope, I wear my usual mask of detachment, even irony, for there has never been a situation, however dire, even this one, that did not strike me as containing at least some element of the human comedy.

— Robert Harris