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" Fact doesn't have to be plausible; it just has to be fact. "
John Lanchester
Plausible
Just
Fact
Related Quotes:
" Tapas is one of the world's most civilised drinking and eating traditions. "
John Lanchester
Most
Traditions
World
" '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
Real
Reality
Word
" 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
World
Pretty
Somewhere
" 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
" 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
" Cheap money feels like the most natural thing in the world - if you don't think about why it's so cheap. "
John Lanchester
Money
Cheap
You
" At the risk of being old-fartish, I like old-school wines that taste the way the winemaker intended, as opposed to organic and untreated ones with more bottle variation. If I want to take a risk, I'll go bungee-jumping. "
John Lanchester
Go
Way
Taste
" 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
Good
Job
Words
" 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
Country
Like
People
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Heroes
Real
Restaurant
" The Internet makes writing about restaurants easier and more interesting in quite a few ways, one of the main ones being to do with the mundane business of checking what's on the menu. "
John Lanchester
Internet
Writing
Business
" 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
" 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
" Is it OK to admit to being slightly obsessed with the TV programme 'Great British Menu?' "
John Lanchester
Admit
Menu
Obsessed
" 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
" 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
" 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
Hong Kong
Father
Bank
" 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
" 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
" I've always been interested in rootedness - mainly, I suppose, because I had very little experience of it. "
John Lanchester
Experience
Little
Had
" If we are going to remake society in the image of the fight against terrorism and put that secret fight at the heart of our democratic order - which is the way we're heading - we need to discuss it, and in public. "
John Lanchester
Society
Terrorism
Fight
" 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
Poetry
Money
Space
" 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
Week
Christmas
Love
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Cinema
Television
Movies
" 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
" One of the main reasons that the landscape of financial stuff in America is different is that gambling is illegal there. So there's a kind of sport-like aspect to the American coverage of finance. "
John Lanchester
Financial
Finance
America
" 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
Potential
Lesson
Father
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Three
Movies
Seen
" Why should the idea of Western liberal democracy automatically imply unregulated free-market capitalism? "
John Lanchester
Why
Capitalism
Liberal