QUOTES by John Lanchester
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
We should all know our family's story, all the more so if nobody tells it to us directly and we have to find it out for ourselves.
Quote by -John Lanchester
I've always been interested in rootedness - mainly, I suppose, because I had very little experience of it.
Quote by -John Lanchester
Dad was a very, very principled man, and he hated any kind of story where the baddies get away with it.
Quote by -John Lanchester
'Whoops!' was a spin-off from 'Capital.' I had the research and wanted to place it somewhere.
Quote by -John Lanchester
'Community,' that loaded word so beloved of politicians, is simply not a reality in most people's lives. It's normal for us to be cut off from each other.
Quote by -John Lanchester
One of the things I have noticed about my novels is that they all concern people who can't quite bring themselves to tell the truth about their own lives... I've come to realise that this interest in damaged, untellable stories comes from my parents.
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The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones.
Quote by -John Lanchester
I remember, the first few years here, I didn't like London much: too big, too crowded, the physical difficulty of getting around.
Quote by -John Lanchester
I don't answer the phone or do my email; I don't do anything until I've got the day's writing done. I have a word count for every day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction, and journalism is 1,500. That's a level I can sustain.
Quote by -John Lanchester
When I first travelled to New York in 1982 on a summer holiday as a student, I remember thinking how exciting it was, how energising it felt, and also how it felt dangerous - it was a place where you could make a wrong turn, either geographically or just in a human interaction, and suddenly find yourself in trouble.
Quote by -John Lanchester
Once you learn to 'speak' money - which is what I felt I did through the research that led me to write 'Whoops!' - you start to see it at work all around you. It's like a language, a code written on the surface of things; it's in flow all around us, all the time.
Quote by -John Lanchester
By the time I was three years old, I'd lived at 10 different addresses in six different countries.
Quote by -John Lanchester
My mother was very proud of being Irish and being a Gunnigan in a straightforward way.
Quote by -John Lanchester
Most people find they have to worry about money; if you don't ever, then in some fundamental way, you are cut off from most people.
Quote by -John Lanchester
I'm an omniviorous reader, but I don't read what could overlap with my own work. It's like tuning a radio frequency - it's much harder to pick up if there's something else there.
Quote by -John Lanchester
'Austerity' is a real weasel word because it's an attempt to make something value-based and abstract out of something which, in reality, consists simply of spending cuts.
Quote by -John Lanchester
Now that I'm an adult and have a big say in what we eat on Christmas Day, turkey doesn't even make it on to the starting grid for consideration. It isn't just my least favourite meat; it's my least favourite protein.
Quote by -John Lanchester
A lot of the time in modern Britain, certainly in urban life, we barely have any contact at all with the people around us.
Quote by -John Lanchester
At the risk of being old-fartish, I like old-school wines that taste the way the winemaker intended, as opposed to organic and untreated ones with more bottle variation. If I want to take a risk, I'll go bungee-jumping.
Quote by -John Lanchester
The 'stuff' in novels touches on every aspect of the world and people's lives. That's what makes it so remarkable just how little there is in the novel about the world of money.
Quote by -John Lanchester
We can all instinctively understand the idea of life insurance; most of us will feel an instinctive repugnance at the thought of the viatical industry, or 'dead peasants insurance.' As market thinking penetrated the life insurance industry, a moral line was crossed, and the application of market ideas was taken too far.
Quote by -John Lanchester
One of the things that happens to you if you write about restaurants - one of the reasons restaurant critics are the real heroes - is that whenever anyone has a grievance about any aspect of the business, they tell you about it.
Quote by -John Lanchester
As an outsider to and observer of the restaurant business, one of the things I most admire about it is the risks people are willing to take.
Quote by -John Lanchester
Obviously you can stash money under your mattress, cut down on hazelnut lattes, but in terms of the larger economic frame of our lives, we have very little agency. About one of the only things you can do is understand it.
Quote by -John Lanchester
I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth.
Quote by -John Lanchester
Money isn't automatically freedom. You need to look carefully at what you're doing to earn the money before you can conclude that you are, in practice, free. This is a cost-benefit analysis we should all perform on our own lives.
Quote by -John Lanchester
Video games are the first new artistic medium since television, but they are more different from television than television was from cinema; they are the newest new thing since the arrival of the movies just over a century ago.
Quote by -John Lanchester
We don't want to think about money in an ideal life; in a well-lived life, money wouldn't be one of our primary concerns, and we prefer to adopt the ostrich position.
Quote by -John Lanchester
I love London in the rare parts of the year when it's quiet, and no time is more reliably quiet than the week between Christmas and New Year.
Quote by -John Lanchester
During the 20th century, the greatest danger to European stability was Germany's sense of its special destiny. During the 21st century, the greatest danger to European stability is Germany's reluctance to accept its special destiny.
Quote by -John Lanchester
My standard Nando's order is a chicken breast burger served 'medium,' which is still fairly spicy.
Quote by -John Lanchester
The deconstructed, postmodern pizza has been with us for ages, and the fact is that pretty much every ingredient in the world has been used as a pizza topping and liked by somebody, somewhere.
Quote by -John Lanchester
Money is like poetry because both involve learning to communicate in a compressed language that packs a lot of meaning and consequence into the minimum semantic space.
Quote by -John Lanchester
I grew up abroad, and when I first passed through London in the 1970s, it seemed a drab and provincial place.
Quote by -John Lanchester
'Dead peasants insurance' is a term that sounds as if it comes straight out of Monty Python. If only that were true.
Quote by -John Lanchester
Is it OK to admit to being slightly obsessed with the TV programme 'Great British Menu?'
Quote by -John Lanchester
If European monetary policy is run according to German interests, huge structural imbalances will accumulate. The Germans will then either have to pay to correct those imbalances or agree that the euro should not be run primarily according to German interests. If they are unwilling to do either of those things, the euro can't survive.
Quote by -John Lanchester
France and Britain have large culinary differences, but one thing they do share is a relatively low tolerance for modernist cooking.
Quote by -John Lanchester
Once I've properly finished a book, my ideal state of being would be to never think about it again. But with 'Capital,' I felt I'd spent so much time with the characters that they were very, very real, and I definitely had a sense of loss about leaving them behind in a way I've not quite had before.
Quote by -John Lanchester
A preoccupation with money and, especially, with what money meant was, in our family, an inherited thing. My father's father, Jack, who died before I was born, was very much possessed by the idea that money was freedom.
Quote by -John Lanchester
If we are going to remake society in the image of the fight against terrorism and put that secret fight at the heart of our democratic order - which is the way we're heading - we need to discuss it, and in public.
Quote by -John Lanchester
Security is a complicated idea and one with an immense potential to trap us - that was one lesson I learnt from my father.
Quote by -John Lanchester