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" 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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Most British tapas bars aren't bars at all. They're restaurants that specialise in tapas. Nothing wrong with that, but it's a bit different from the Spanish way of doing things, in which tapas is an adjunct to the drinks and the general vibe. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Way

Taste

" 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. "

" '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. "

" By the time I was three years old, I'd lived at 10 different addresses in six different countries. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm fortunate in having journalism as a sideline to pay the bills, and I essentially do it in order to take as long as I want with books. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Now that I'm an adult and have a big say in what we eat on Christmas Day, turkey doesn't even make it on to the starting grid for consideration. It isn't just my least favourite meat; it's my least favourite protein. "

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

" I remember, the first few years here, I didn't like London much: too big, too crowded, the physical difficulty of getting 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. "

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

" Security is a complicated idea and one with an immense potential to trap us - that was one lesson I learnt from my father. "

" 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 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. "