Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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%. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

" A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone. "

" 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. "

" Germany has to put the broader European interest on the same level as its own national interest, or the euro is toast. "

" I grew up abroad, and when I first passed through London in the 1970s, it seemed a drab and provincial place. "

John Lanchester

Through

Place

" We should all know our family's story, all the more so if nobody tells it to us directly and we have to find it out for ourselves. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" My standard Nando's order is a chicken breast burger served 'medium,' which is still fairly spicy. "

" 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. "

" A lot of the time in modern Britain, certainly in urban life, we barely have any contact at all with the people around us. "

" 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. "

" Most British tapas bars aren't bars at all. They're restaurants that specialise in tapas. Nothing wrong with that, but it's a bit different from the Spanish way of doing things, in which tapas is an adjunct to the drinks and the general vibe. "

" 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. "

" Some things get clearer as you look back on them. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" I rather envy writers who do variations on a theme. I like reading those books, but in practice, I can't do it. "

" I love short stories, but I've never had the impulse to write one. Same for ghost stories. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" My mum had this amazing ability to deflect things, and from an early age, I knew what I was not supposed to talk about. "

" 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. "

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

" I've always been interested in rootedness - mainly, I suppose, because I had very little experience of it. "

" Why should the idea of Western liberal democracy automatically imply unregulated free-market capitalism? "

" France and Britain have large culinary differences, but one thing they do share is a relatively low tolerance for modernist cooking. "

" You can't explain collateralized debt obligation in a novel - it's too draggy. "