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

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

" 'Fine dining.' I'd love to know who coined the term and whether they meant it to be as offputting as it is. The words evoke an idea of phoney refinement, of needless flummery, snooty waiters, and an atmosphere designed to intimidate the customer. "

John Lanchester

" 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. "

John Lanchester

" 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

" Cheap money feels like the most natural thing in the world - if you don't think about why it's so cheap. "

John Lanchester

" '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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" '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

" Tapas is one of the world's most civilised drinking and eating traditions. "

John Lanchester

" 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

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

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

Straightforward

" 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

" 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

" 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

" The early-'80s recession was good for good restaurants, not least because it put bad ones out of business. "

John Lanchester

" I have a horror of going down dead ends, which you can easily do with a novel, spending months on it and then realising that it's all wrong. It's demoralising, because you don't get the time back. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Hospitality is central to the restaurant business, yet it's a hard idea to define precisely. Mostly, it involves being nice to people and making them feel welcome. You notice it when it's there, and you particularly notice it when it isn't. A single significant lapse in this area can be your dominant impression of an entire meal. "

John Lanchester

" 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

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

John Lanchester

" '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

" 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

" 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

" 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%. "

John Lanchester