Robert Harris
Robert Harris
British author, journalist, and BBC reporter who became known for his best-selling historical novel, Fatherland. The work is a thriller set during World War II.
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 March 1957
writing political interest
I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.
writing trying four
Don't try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours.
writing heart stories
I write as well as I can. I'm a journalist at heart, so it's the story that matters.
real writing done
It's when you've stopped writing and are doing other things, especially when you're asleep, that the real work is done.
flower writing thinking
It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you're forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.
morning writing together
I've always just wanted to earn my living by writing. The best thing is to go into my study in the morning and put words together.
writing years too-late
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.
lives marine novels operative people sorts
I like to take people you wouldn't really think people would write novels about: an aqueduct engineer, a code-breaker, a hedge-fund manager. It's in those sorts of lives that I find more fascination than in a CIA operative or a Marine or something like that.
africa hospital minor running south sure took
It was a minor injury. He was running when it happened. We took him to hospital in South Africa because we just wanted to make sure he was okay, and that done, he is now back to work.
attitude change fling hands holding men mores quite social time
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.
emotion emotions family people swayed sympathy
Those two people were swayed more by sympathy and emotion for the family than anything objective. That's my feeling.
beyond luxury spend within
Within reason, I can write what I like and spend as long doing it as is necessary. That is a luxury beyond price.
basically black crisis forget people poverty unless
Black poverty has persisted and become intractable but unless we have some crisis like this, we basically forget about these people -- out of sight, out of mind.
life
There's nothing more interesting than the details of someone's life.