John Lanchester Quotes
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The early-'80s recession was good for good restaurants, not least because it put bad ones out of business.
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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.
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Dad was a very, very principled man, and he hated any kind of story where the baddies get away with it.
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Chefs get sucked into the trap of 'fine dining' because some guides make it central to their ratings system and because some customers have been trained to focus their expectations on the trappings and not on the food. It's all a gigantic waste of energy.
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A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone.
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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.
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'Dead peasants insurance' is a term that sounds as if it comes straight out of Monty Python. If only that were true.
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Celebrity farmer. Now there's a phrase that should be an oxymoron. There are farmers on both sides of my family, and I can attest that the overlap between the way farmers live, work and think, and celebrity culture, is exactly 0%.
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'Whoops!' was a spin-off from 'Capital.' I had the research and wanted to place it somewhere.
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The slogans of globalisation are 'Get on your bike' and 'The world is flat.' People who want to get on have to be willing to move, often and unhesitatingly, at the behest of their employer or to seek work.
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A lot of the time in modern Britain, certainly in urban life, we barely have any contact at all with the people around us.
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I write non-fiction quicker, and I write it on a computer. Fiction I write longhand, and that helps make it clear that it comes from a slightly different part of the brain, I think.
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In the U.S., it is a crime to lie to a federal agent, and it's often this that sends people to jail over financial matters.
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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.
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It doesn't thrill me to bits that the state has to use the tools of electronic surveillance to keep us safe, but it seems clear to me that it does, and that our right to privacy needs to be qualified, just as our other rights are qualified, in the interest of general security and the common good.
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'Fine dining.' I'd love to know who coined the term and whether they meant it to be as offputting as it is. The words evoke an idea of phoney refinement, of needless flummery, snooty waiters, and an atmosphere designed to intimidate the customer.
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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.
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I have sane friends, solvent friends, foodie friends, and friends who can take time off in the week, but I don't know one single person who ticks all those boxes.
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The truth is, it is hard to know where ideas come from.
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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.
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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.
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I've always been interested in rootedness - mainly, I suppose, because I had very little experience of it.
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I rather envy writers who do variations on a theme. I like reading those books, but in practice, I can't do it.
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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.