Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

John Lanchester

Experience

Late

Restaurant

Related Quotes:

" Fact doesn't have to be plausible; it just has to be fact. "

" The 'stuff' in novels touches on every aspect of the world and people's lives. That's what makes it so remarkable just how little there is in the novel about the world of money. "

" Now that I'm an adult and have a big say in what we eat on Christmas Day, turkey doesn't even make it on to the starting grid for consideration. It isn't just my least favourite meat; it's my least favourite protein. "

" 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. "

" Video games are the first new artistic medium since television, but they are more different from television than television was from cinema; they are the newest new thing since the arrival of the movies just over a century ago. "

" In sport, the money goes to the talent; it goes directly to the worker - unlike a bank, which sits in the middle of transactions and whose income bears no relation to any of the services it provides. "

" In my view, a review should be like talking to a friend who's just asked you, 'What was it like?' You're giving a verdict on an experience, not trying for a definitive last judgment. "

" 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. "

" Money is like poetry because both involve learning to communicate in a compressed language that packs a lot of meaning and consequence into the minimum semantic space. "

" Tapas is one of the world's most civilised drinking and eating traditions. "

" One of the things that happens to you if you write about restaurants - one of the reasons restaurant critics are the real heroes - is that whenever anyone has a grievance about any aspect of the business, they tell you about it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

John Lanchester

Special

Sense

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" '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. "

" Nando's is a casual restaurant rather than a fast-food one - another aspirational touch. The food is energetically spiced, where so many of its competitors are bland and grilled to order, where the competition fries food and then lets it sit around. "

" 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. "

" Photography brought a lot to painting because it forced artists to think about what painting could do that photography couldn't. "

" Once I've properly finished a book, my ideal state of being would be to never think about it again. But with 'Capital,' I felt I'd spent so much time with the characters that they were very, very real, and I definitely had a sense of loss about leaving them behind in a way I've not quite had before. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth. "

" I remember, the first few years here, I didn't like London much: too big, too crowded, the physical difficulty of getting around. "