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" Dad was a very, very principled man, and he hated any kind of story where the baddies get away with it. "

John Lanchester

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" '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

" 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. "

John Lanchester

" 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. "

John Lanchester

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

" 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

" 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. "

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

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

John Lanchester

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" My mother was very proud of being Irish and being a Gunnigan in a straightforward way. "

John Lanchester

Straightforward

" 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

" 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

" 'Austerity' is a real weasel word because it's an attempt to make something value-based and abstract out of something which, in reality, consists simply of spending cuts. "

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 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

" 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

" 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

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

John Lanchester