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

John Lanchester

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" 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

" One of the main reasons that the landscape of financial stuff in America is different is that gambling is illegal there. So there's a kind of sport-like aspect to the American coverage of finance. "

John Lanchester

" 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. "

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" 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. "

John Lanchester

" Tapas is one of the world's most civilised drinking and eating traditions. "

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" 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. "

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

" Fires and floods, we're hardwired to accept them or at least file them under Bad Things Happening. But there's something so abstract and so modern about a bank making a technical mistake about how it funded its obligations to depositors, and suddenly you're out of work. "

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

" 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

" 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. "

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

" 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

" 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. "

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

" The 'stuff' in novels touches on every aspect of the world and people's lives. That's what makes it so remarkable just how little there is in the novel about the world of money. "

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

" 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

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

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

" Money isn't automatically freedom. You need to look carefully at what you're doing to earn the money before you can conclude that you are, in practice, free. This is a cost-benefit analysis we should all perform on our own lives. "

John Lanchester

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

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

" 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. "

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

" 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. "

John Lanchester

" Most people find they have to worry about money; if you don't ever, then in some fundamental way, you are cut off from most people. "

John Lanchester

" 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. "

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester