John Lanchester Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Hospitality is central to the restaurant business, yet it's a hard idea to define precisely. Mostly, it involves being nice to people and making them feel welcome. You notice it when it's there, and you particularly notice it when it isn't. A single significant lapse in this area can be your dominant impression of an entire meal.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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I've always been interested in rootedness - mainly, I suppose, because I had very little experience of it.
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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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There's an awful lot of us who don't quite speak finance, speak money.
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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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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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'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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Fires and floods, we're hardwired to accept them or at least file them under Bad Things Happening. But there's something so abstract and so modern about a bank making a technical mistake about how it funded its obligations to depositors, and suddenly you're out of work.
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Photography brought a lot to painting because it forced artists to think about what painting could do that photography couldn't.
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Is it OK to admit to being slightly obsessed with the TV programme 'Great British Menu?'
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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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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 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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'Whoops!' was a spin-off from 'Capital.' I had the research and wanted to place it somewhere.