People perish. Books are immortal.

— Robert Harris

People will perish, but books are immortal. (Pompeii)

— Robert Harris

Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.

— Robert Harris

Right, you see that girl over there, the one in that group that keeps looking right at you?'...' Right, let's say I'm convinced she's wearing black knickers - she looks like a black knickers kind of gal to me - and I'm so sure that's what she's wearing, so positive of that sartorial fact, I want to bet a million dollars on it. The trouble is, if I'm wrong, I'm wiped out. So I also bet she's wearing knickers that aren't black, but are any one of a whole basket of colors - let's say I put nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that possibility: that's the rest of the market; that's the hedge. This is a crude example, okay, in every sense, but hear me out. Now if I'm right, I make fifty K, but even if I'm wrong I'm going to lose fifty K, because I'm hedged. And because ninety-five percent of my million dollars is not in use - I'm never going to be called on to show it: the only risk is in the spread - I can make similar bets with other people. Or I can bet it on something else entirely. And the beauty of it is I don't have to be right all the time - if I can just get the color of her underwear right fifty-five percent of the time I'm going to wind up very rich...

— Robert Harris

Social mores change all the time. In the mid-1970s, it would've been astonishing, say, to see two men holding hands in the streets. And the attitude to having a fling with a girl, or whatever, was quite different then.

— Robert Harris

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

— Robert Harris

The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it - whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust.

— Robert Harris

The trouble with Lucius," he said, putting his feet up on the desk after this cousin has gone," is that he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.

— Robert Harris

To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realized it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

— Robert Harris

We live in an age of great jitteriness in the financial markets. And there's no doubt at all, I think, that the volume of computer-traded stocks has helped contribute to that.

— Robert Harris