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" '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
People
Community
Politicians
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" 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
" 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
" 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
" Obviously you can stash money under your mattress, cut down on hazelnut lattes, but in terms of the larger economic frame of our lives, we have very little agency. About one of the only things you can do is understand it. "
John Lanchester
You
Frame
Money
" 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
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Loss
Book
Leaving
" 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
" I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth. "
John Lanchester
Birth
Believe
Very
" 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
" 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
" By the time I was three years old, I'd lived at 10 different addresses in six different countries. "
John Lanchester
Different
Lived
Old
" 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
" 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 love short stories, but I've never had the impulse to write one. Same for ghost stories. "
John Lanchester
Love
Ghost
Stories
" 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
Food
Touch
Competition
" 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
Done
Writing
Phone
" 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
" The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones. "
John Lanchester
Economics
Good Times
Restaurant
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I remember, the first few years here, I didn't like London much: too big, too crowded, the physical difficulty of getting around. "
John Lanchester
Difficulty
Remember
London
" 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
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Excitement
Personal
Book
" Chefs get sucked into the trap of 'fine dining' because some guides make it central to their ratings system and because some customers have been trained to focus their expectations on the trappings and not on the food. It's all a gigantic waste of energy. "
John Lanchester
Focus
Energy
Waste
" 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
Accept
Special
Sense
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Boxes
Week
Time