'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.

The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art.

People want to be creatively satisfied, and having fun is such an important part of that.

Toys are put on this Earth to be played with by a child.

Walt Disney always said, 'For every laugh, there should be a tear.' I believe in that.

I believe in the nobility of entertaining people and I take great, great pride that people are willing to give me two or three hours of their busy lives.

I do what I do because of Walt Disney. Goofy. Mickey Mouse. I never forgot how their films entertained me.

My father pulled into Pearl Harbor four days after the bombing, and he said, everything was still burning. He said they never told the public how bad it was. It was really bad.

If you're sitting in your minivan, playing your computer animated films for your children in the back seat, is it the animation that's entertaining you as you drive and listen? No, it's the storytelling. That's why we put so much importance on story. No amount of great animation will save a bad story.

I am, by nature, an honest person. I wear my emotions on my sleeve. There is no 'behind closed doors' with me.

Every movie has three things you have to do - you have to have a compelling story that keeps people on the edge of their seats; you have to populate that story with memorable and appealing characters; and you have to put that story and those characters in a believable world. Those three things are so vitally important.

Sure, they were simple desk lamps with only a minimal amount of movement, but you could immediately tell that Luxo Jr. was a baby, and that the big one was his mother. In that short little film, computer animation went from a novelty to a serious tool for filmmaking.