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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. "
John Lanchester
Life
Time
People
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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. "
John Lanchester
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" There is a moral underpinning to economics. And the kinds of questions that it asks and the kinds of solutions it proposes do seem to me to belong in a more humanistic framework. "
John Lanchester
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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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Excitement
Personal
Book
" My mum had this amazing ability to deflect things, and from an early age, I knew what I was not supposed to talk about. "
John Lanchester
Ability
Early
Amazing
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Books
Want
Take
" The Internet makes writing about restaurants easier and more interesting in quite a few ways, one of the main ones being to do with the mundane business of checking what's on the menu. "
John Lanchester
Internet
Writing
Business
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Yourself
Thinking
New York
" Photography brought a lot to painting because it forced artists to think about what painting could do that photography couldn't. "
John Lanchester
Because
Think
Painting
" I think smartphones are one of humanity's most remarkable creations: computers are amazing enough, but a supercomputer you can carry in your pocket and communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere... it's no wonder they're troublingly addictive. "
John Lanchester
Humanity
You
Think
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Sound
Think
Big
" Tapas is one of the world's most civilised drinking and eating traditions. "
John Lanchester
Most
Traditions
World
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Born
Family
Father
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Sky
Buildings
Food
" Once you learn to 'speak' money - which is what I felt I did through the research that led me to write 'Whoops!' - you start to see it at work all around you. It's like a language, a code written on the surface of things; it's in flow all around us, all the time. "
John Lanchester
Time
Work
Money
" The deconstructed, postmodern pizza has been with us for ages, and the fact is that pretty much every ingredient in the world has been used as a pizza topping and liked by somebody, somewhere. "
John Lanchester
World
Pretty
Somewhere
" The truth is, it is hard to know where ideas come from. "
John Lanchester
Come
Truth Is
Truth
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Bad
Work
Mistake
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Live
Start
World
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Now
Bed
Bedroom
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Stop
Dream
People
" We can all instinctively understand the idea of life insurance; most of us will feel an instinctive repugnance at the thought of the viatical industry, or 'dead peasants insurance.' As market thinking penetrated the life insurance industry, a moral line was crossed, and the application of market ideas was taken too far. "
John Lanchester
Ideas
Thought
Life
" The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones. "
John Lanchester
Economics
Good Times
Restaurant
" Fact doesn't have to be plausible; it just has to be fact. "
John Lanchester
Plausible
Just
Fact
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Building
Sound
Horror
" I grew up abroad, and when I first passed through London in the 1970s, it seemed a drab and provincial place. "
John Lanchester
Up
Through
Place
" The early-'80s recession was good for good restaurants, not least because it put bad ones out of business. "
John Lanchester
Recession
Bad
Because
" I'm an omniviorous reader, but I don't read what could overlap with my own work. It's like tuning a radio frequency - it's much harder to pick up if there's something else there. "
John Lanchester
Radio
Work
Like
" The Chinese are much too sensible to like turkey - come to think of it, I don't think I've ever encountered turkey anywhere in East Asia, either in a market or on a menu. "
John Lanchester
Turkey
Market
Come
" Germany has to put the broader European interest on the same level as its own national interest, or the euro is toast. "
John Lanchester
Level
Toast
Same
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Our
Position
Think