John Lanchester Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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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.
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Tapas is one of the world's most civilised drinking and eating traditions.
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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.
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People misunderstand what a police state is. It isn't a country where the police strut around in jackboots; it's a country where the police can do anything they like. Similarly, a security state is one in which the security establishment can do anything it likes.
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I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth.
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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.
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The Internet makes writing about restaurants easier and more interesting in quite a few ways, one of the main ones being to do with the mundane business of checking what's on the menu.
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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.
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The first ATM in Hong Kong was actually at the foot of the bank. I remember my father using it. And I find it absolutely terrifying that - something about the way the machine just kind of coughed up money with no difficulty.
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My mother was very proud of being Irish and being a Gunnigan in a straightforward way.
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I love short stories, but I've never had the impulse to write one. Same for ghost stories.
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France and Britain have large culinary differences, but one thing they do share is a relatively low tolerance for modernist cooking.
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'The Big Short' is, among other things, a blistering, detailed indictment of the way Wall Street does business, and its particular villains are the investment banks.
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Security is a complicated idea and one with an immense potential to trap us - that was one lesson I learnt from my father.
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The Chinese are much too sensible to like turkey - come to think of it, I don't think I've ever encountered turkey anywhere in East Asia, either in a market or on a menu.
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Germany has to put the broader European interest on the same level as its own national interest, or the euro is toast.
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One of the main reasons that the landscape of financial stuff in America is different is that gambling is illegal there. So there's a kind of sport-like aspect to the American coverage of finance.
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In the world where people with money overlap with restaurants and try to work out how to make more money, one of the things they talk about is the desire to find 'the new pizza.' This means a new mass-market product that can be made quickly and eaten both on the premises and as a takeaway.
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My mum had this amazing ability to deflect things, and from an early age, I knew what I was not supposed to talk about.
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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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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.
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I'd like to pretend to be all Olympian and above it, as if this is a phenomenon I'm observing from a great height, nothing to do with my own behavior at all - but the fact is I'm absolutely one of those people in the cafe staring at my phone.
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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.
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There is a moral underpinning to economics. And the kinds of questions that it asks and the kinds of solutions it proposes do seem to me to belong in a more humanistic framework.