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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

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

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

" I have a horror of going down dead ends, which you can easily do with a novel, spending months on it and then realising that it's all wrong. It's demoralising, because you don't get the time back. "

John Lanchester

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

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

" Germany has to put the broader European interest on the same level as its own national interest, or the euro is toast. "

John Lanchester

" 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

" 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. "

John Lanchester

" 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. "

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

" 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

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

John Lanchester

" It would be too glib, not a hundred per cent true, to say that my father's career as a banker was what made me a writer. But it would be slightly true, and it was certainly the case that his work as a banker made me see that the trade-offs people make between their work and their lives are often badly skewed. "

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

" 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. "

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

" 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

" '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

" 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

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

John Lanchester

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

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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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. "

John Lanchester