Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
All Quotes by author - John Lanchester
" A lot of the time in modern Britain, certainly in urban life, we barely have any contact at all with the people around us. "
Life
Time
People
" A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone. "
Thought
Experience
Alone
" 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. "
Born
Family
Father
" 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. "
Business
Risks
Restaurant
" 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. "
Go
Way
Taste
" 'Austerity' is a real weasel word because it's an attempt to make something value-based and abstract out of something which, in reality, consists simply of spending cuts. "
Real
Reality
Word
" 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. "
Experience
Late
Restaurant
" By the time I was three years old, I'd lived at 10 different addresses in six different countries. "
Different
Lived
Old
" 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%. "
Culture
Family
Live
" Cheap money feels like the most natural thing in the world - if you don't think about why it's so cheap. "
Money
Cheap
You
" 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. "
Focus
Energy
Waste
" '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. "
People
Community
Politicians
" Dad was a very, very principled man, and he hated any kind of story where the baddies get away with it. "
Hated
Away
Where
" 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. "
Accept
Special
Sense
" Fact doesn't have to be plausible; it just has to be fact. "
Plausible
Just
Fact
" '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. "
Who
Words
Love
" 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. "
Bad
Work
Mistake
" 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. "
Now
Bed
Bedroom
" France and Britain have large culinary differences, but one thing they do share is a relatively low tolerance for modernist cooking. "
Tolerance
France
Cooking
" Germany has to put the broader European interest on the same level as its own national interest, or the euro is toast. "
Level
Toast
Same
" 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. "
Nice
You
Welcome
" 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. "
Phone
Nothing
People
" I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth. "
Birth
Believe
Very
" 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. "
Done
Writing
Phone
" I don't think quantitative easing is deliberately misleading, but I do think it's suspiciously bland and reassuring. It doesn't sound like anything big, experimental, scary and strange - which is what many economists think it is. "
Sound
Think
Big
" If European monetary policy is run according to German interests, huge structural imbalances will accumulate. The Germans will then either have to pay to correct those imbalances or agree that the euro should not be run primarily according to German interests. If they are unwilling to do either of those things, the euro can't survive. "
Policy
Survive
Pay
" 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. "
Society
Terrorism
Fight
" I grew up abroad, and when I first passed through London in the 1970s, it seemed a drab and provincial place. "
Up
Through
Place
" 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. "
Sky
Buildings
Food
" 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. "
Hong Kong
Father
Bank
Check our other websites:
BookDark
MusicDark