Robert Harris Quotes

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

I'm the last person to ask 'what do you remember' from a particular time period... I like to learn from the past... not 'live' in it.

With time and experience comes a different perception of what's going on around you.

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

I think you only see experiences as defining moments with distance.

When you're in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That's the consolation of philosophy.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

Time puts things in proper perspective.

Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.

So much of memory comes from the beginning of our lives when we know the world for the first time with a kind of clarity. It is that discovery of the past in the present on which a writer depends again and again as if our lost childhoods, like the surprising cyclamen plant, are forever opening new blossoms.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we start to excavate our memories.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

Becoming a reader grows our horizons, our appetite for the good, the true and the beautiful, and our empathy.

Real stories - whether in pure fiction or historical - have a certain indefinable power; we are endlessly curious about the past and hungry for learning that we hope will illuminate the present.

Near the end of my career, I saw things that didn't make too much sense to me when I was a kid.

Some things get clearer as you look back on them.

You get time to appreciate things. Perspective, you start looking at things differently.

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

Reading enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time.