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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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

" I don't think quantitative easing is deliberately misleading, but I do think it's suspiciously bland and reassuring. It doesn't sound like anything big, experimental, scary and strange - which is what many economists think it is. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" People misunderstand what a police state is. It isn't a country where the police strut around in jackboots; it's a country where the police can do anything they like. Similarly, a security state is one in which the security establishment can do anything it likes. "

John Lanchester

Country

People

" Photography brought a lot to painting because it forced artists to think about what painting could do that photography couldn't. "

" You can't explain collateralized debt obligation in a novel - it's too draggy. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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

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

" The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Obviously you can stash money under your mattress, cut down on hazelnut lattes, but in terms of the larger economic frame of our lives, we have very little agency. About one of the only things you can do is understand it. "