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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Economics

Questions

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Some things get clearer as you look back on them. "

" If European monetary policy is run according to German interests, huge structural imbalances will accumulate. The Germans will then either have to pay to correct those imbalances or agree that the euro should not be run primarily according to German interests. If they are unwilling to do either of those things, the euro can't survive. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" My mum had this amazing ability to deflect things, and from an early age, I knew what I was not supposed to talk about. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

John Lanchester

Money

Who

" 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. "

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

" 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%. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" To make three films out of one shortish book, they have to turn it into an epic, just as 'Lord of the Rings' is an epic. But 'The Hobbit' isn't an epic: its tone is intimate and personal, and although it's full of adventures and excitement, they're on a different scale to those of the bigger book. "

" I'd like to pretend to be all Olympian and above it, as if this is a phenomenon I'm observing from a great height, nothing to do with my own behavior at all - but the fact is I'm absolutely one of those people in the cafe staring at my phone. "

" 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. "

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