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" 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. "

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" We should all know our family's story, all the more so if nobody tells it to us directly and we have to find it out for ourselves. "

John Lanchester

Story

Nobody

Know

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

John Lanchester

Admit

Obsessed

" '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. "

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

" 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. "

John Lanchester

Radio

Work

" 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. "

" Our societies have achieved a general level of prosperity of which most of all the human beings who have ever lived could only dream. Now we need to show that we can stop continually wanting more - more money, more stuff. We must show that it is possible for people to realise that they have enough. "

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

" I think smartphones are one of humanity's most remarkable creations: computers are amazing enough, but a supercomputer you can carry in your pocket and communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere... it's no wonder they're troublingly addictive. "

" 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. "

" '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. "