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" 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. "

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" 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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It doesn't thrill me to bits that the state has to use the tools of electronic surveillance to keep us safe, but it seems clear to me that it does, and that our right to privacy needs to be qualified, just as our other rights are qualified, in the interest of general security and the common good. "

John Lanchester

Good

Privacy

" 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. "

" In the U.S., it is a crime to lie to a federal agent, and it's often this that sends people to jail over financial matters. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The first ATM in Hong Kong was actually at the foot of the bank. I remember my father using it. And I find it absolutely terrifying that - something about the way the machine just kind of coughed up money with no difficulty. "

" Rising inequality is not a law of nature - it's not even a law of economics. It is a consequence of political and economic arrangements, and those arrangements can be changed. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" One of the things I have noticed about my novels is that they all concern people who can't quite bring themselves to tell the truth about their own lives... I've come to realise that this interest in damaged, untellable stories comes from my parents. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Is it OK to admit to being slightly obsessed with the TV programme 'Great British Menu?' "

John Lanchester

Admit

Obsessed

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