John Lanchester Quotes
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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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The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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'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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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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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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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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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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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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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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My standard Nando's order is a chicken breast burger served 'medium,' which is still fairly spicy.
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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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Is it OK to admit to being slightly obsessed with the TV programme 'Great British Menu?'
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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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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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The truth is, it is hard to know where ideas come from.