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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
Business
Risks
Restaurant
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" A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone. "
John Lanchester
Thought
Experience
Alone
" There's an awful lot of us who don't quite speak finance, speak money. "
John Lanchester
Money
Who
Us
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Want
Move
Work
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Week
Christmas
Love
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Look
Practice
Free
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Write
Think
Different
" I think the Internet was invented specifically to stop people finishing their books. And it does quite a good job. I don't have blocking software, though I could easily imagine needing it. I just don't do that stuff until I've got the words done for the day. "
John Lanchester
Good
Job
Words
" 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 Big Short' is, among other things, a blistering, detailed indictment of the way Wall Street does business, and its particular villains are the investment banks. "
John Lanchester
Way
Street
Short
" One of the main reasons that the landscape of financial stuff in America is different is that gambling is illegal there. So there's a kind of sport-like aspect to the American coverage of finance. "
John Lanchester
Financial
Finance
America
" Inequality in the developed world fell for most of the 20th century; we can make it fall for most of the 21st century, too. But it won't happen without sustained pressure on politicians from electorates. "
John Lanchester
Fall
Inequality
Most
" Most people find they have to worry about money; if you don't ever, then in some fundamental way, you are cut off from most people. "
John Lanchester
You
Find
Money
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Hong Kong
Father
Bank
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Law
Economics
Political
" I'm a huge fan of Peter Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' movies - I went to all three of them on the day they opened and have seen all of them several times since. "
John Lanchester
Three
Movies
Seen
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Go
Way
Taste
" Fact doesn't have to be plausible; it just has to be fact. "
John Lanchester
Plausible
Just
Fact
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Good
Me
Privacy
" 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
" Security is a complicated idea and one with an immense potential to trap us - that was one lesson I learnt from my father. "
John Lanchester
Potential
Lesson
Father
" It seems to me obviously axiomatic that markets are not magical, that they're organised in a range of regulated entities created by men. We decide in what we will have markets, and we decide how the rules work and how they'll conduct themselves. "
John Lanchester
Rules
Magical
Work
" France and Britain have large culinary differences, but one thing they do share is a relatively low tolerance for modernist cooking. "
John Lanchester
Tolerance
France
Cooking
" The early-'80s recession was good for good restaurants, not least because it put bad ones out of business. "
John Lanchester
Recession
Bad
Because
" 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%. "
John Lanchester
Culture
Family
Live
" 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
Me
Economics
Questions