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" 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. "

John Lanchester

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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

John Lanchester

" Often, in horror films, the single most effective device for building a sense of scariness is the soundtrack: the clanking of chains, the groaning of off-stage ghouls, the unmistakable sound of a cannibal rustic firing up a chainsaw. "

John Lanchester

" 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

" 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

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

John Lanchester

" 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. "

John Lanchester

" 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. "

John Lanchester

" I love London in the rare parts of the year when it's quiet, and no time is more reliably quiet than the week between Christmas and New Year. "

John Lanchester

" 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. "

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

" The Chinese are much too sensible to like turkey - come to think of it, I don't think I've ever encountered turkey anywhere in East Asia, either in a market or on a menu. "

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

" 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. "

John Lanchester

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

John Lanchester

" In my view, a review should be like talking to a friend who's just asked you, 'What was it like?' You're giving a verdict on an experience, not trying for a definitive last judgment. "

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

" '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

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

John Lanchester

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

" In a democracy, people tend to get the kind of government they deserve. "

John Lanchester

" Fact doesn't have to be plausible; it just has to be fact. "

John Lanchester