John Lanchester Quotes
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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.
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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.
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I'm fortunate in having journalism as a sideline to pay the bills, and I essentially do it in order to take as long as I want with books.
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'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.
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Soap prevented more deaths than penicillin. That’s technology, not science.
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Nobody in the developing world is going to take, as an answer to their aspirations, the developed world's reply: 'Sorry, you can't; we've already used it all up.' To earn the right to look the developing world in the eye and start this conversation, we need a reassessment of how we live and what we want.
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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.
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I grew up in Hong Kong, and London used to seem very gray: the sky was gray, the buildings were gray, the food was incredibly gray - the food had, like, new kinds of grayness specially invented for it.
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It would be too glib, not a hundred per cent true, to say that my father's career as a banker was what made me a writer. But it would be slightly true, and it was certainly the case that his work as a banker made me see that the trade-offs people make between their work and their lives are often badly skewed.
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Often, in horror films, the single most effective device for building a sense of scariness is the soundtrack: the clanking of chains, the groaning of off-stage ghouls, the unmistakable sound of a cannibal rustic firing up a chainsaw.
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In sport, the money goes to the talent; it goes directly to the worker - unlike a bank, which sits in the middle of transactions and whose income bears no relation to any of the services it provides.
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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.
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To make three films out of one shortish book, they have to turn it into an epic, just as 'Lord of the Rings' is an epic. But 'The Hobbit' isn't an epic: its tone is intimate and personal, and although it's full of adventures and excitement, they're on a different scale to those of the bigger book.
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Rising inequality is not a law of nature - it's not even a law of economics. It is a consequence of political and economic arrangements, and those arrangements can be changed.
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The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones.
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I grew up abroad, and when I first passed through London in the 1970s, it seemed a drab and provincial place.
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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.
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My standard Nando's order is a chicken breast burger served 'medium,' which is still fairly spicy.
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I have a horror of going down dead ends, which you can easily do with a novel, spending months on it and then realising that it's all wrong. It's demoralising, because you don't get the time back.
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By the time I was three years old, I'd lived at 10 different addresses in six different countries.
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Our societies have achieved a general level of prosperity of which most of all the human beings who have ever lived could only dream. Now we need to show that we can stop continually wanting more - more money, more stuff. We must show that it is possible for people to realise that they have enough.
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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.
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I grew up mainly in the Far East, where my father worked for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, which was then a small, well-run colonial institution and not the global colossus it is today.
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There's an awful lot of us who don't quite speak finance, speak money.