For a while, I had a rule of no smartphone in bed, but now I've upgraded to no smartphone in the bedroom. The fact that we need rules shows how much these things have invaded our lives.

Because the Spanish eat so crazily late - anybody who's been to Spain has had the experience of sitting down at 9:30 P.M. to find themselves the first customer in the restaurant - they tend to favour an early-evening drink and a nibble to keep them going.

I love short stories, but I've never had the impulse to write one. Same for ghost stories.

Tapas is one of the world's most civilised drinking and eating traditions.

Security is a complicated idea and one with an immense potential to trap us - that was one lesson I learnt from my father.

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.

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.

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.

France and Britain have large culinary differences, but one thing they do share is a relatively low tolerance for modernist cooking.

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.

Is it OK to admit to being slightly obsessed with the TV programme 'Great British Menu?'

'Dead peasants insurance' is a term that sounds as if it comes straight out of Monty Python. If only that were true.

I grew up abroad, and when I first passed through London in the 1970s, it seemed a drab and provincial place.

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.

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.

There's an awful lot of us who don't quite speak finance, speak money.

My standard Nando's order is a chicken breast burger served 'medium,' which is still fairly spicy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fact doesn't have to be plausible; it just has to be fact.

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.

Some things get clearer as you look back on them.

A lot of the time in modern Britain, certainly in urban life, we barely have any contact at all with the people around us.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

My mother was very proud of being Irish and being a Gunnigan in a straightforward way.

By the time I was three years old, I'd lived at 10 different addresses in six different countries.

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.

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.

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.

I remember, the first few years here, I didn't like London much: too big, too crowded, the physical difficulty of getting around.

The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones.

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.

'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.

The truth is, it is hard to know where ideas come from.

'Whoops!' was a spin-off from 'Capital.' I had the research and wanted to place it somewhere.

Dad was a very, very principled man, and he hated any kind of story where the baddies get away with it.

I've always been interested in rootedness - mainly, I suppose, because I had very little experience of it.

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.