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" By the time I was three years old, I'd lived at 10 different addresses in six different countries. "

John Lanchester

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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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" 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

" The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones. "

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" It would be too glib, not a hundred per cent true, to say that my father's career as a banker was what made me a writer. But it would be slightly true, and it was certainly the case that his work as a banker made me see that the trade-offs people make between their work and their lives are often badly skewed. "

John Lanchester

" 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. "

John Lanchester

" 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. "

John Lanchester

" 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

" 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

" 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

" I think 'community,' in the sense in which politicians use, it is largely a cant term. "

John Lanchester

" '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. "

John Lanchester

" 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

" In the world where people with money overlap with restaurants and try to work out how to make more money, one of the things they talk about is the desire to find 'the new pizza.' This means a new mass-market product that can be made quickly and eaten both on the premises and as a takeaway. "

John Lanchester

" 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. "

John Lanchester

" 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

" People misunderstand what a police state is. It isn't a country where the police strut around in jackboots; it's a country where the police can do anything they like. Similarly, a security state is one in which the security establishment can do anything it likes. "

John Lanchester

" 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

" '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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

John Lanchester

" '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. "

John Lanchester

" 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

" There's an awful lot of us who don't quite speak finance, speak money. "

John Lanchester

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

John Lanchester