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" 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. "

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" 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

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

" 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. "

" Dad was a very, very principled man, and he hated any kind of story where the baddies get away with it. "

" 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. "

" I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" France and Britain have large culinary differences, but one thing they do share is a relatively low tolerance for modernist cooking. "

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

John Lanchester

Through

Place

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I love short stories, but I've never had the impulse to write one. Same for ghost stories. "

" 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. "

" As an outsider to and observer of the restaurant business, one of the things I most admire about it is the risks people are willing to take. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" The truth is, it is hard to know where ideas come from. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "