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" You can't explain collateralized debt obligation in a novel - it's too draggy. "
John Lanchester
Debt
Explain
Obligation
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" 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. "
John Lanchester
Stop
Dream
People
" Photography brought a lot to painting because it forced artists to think about what painting could do that photography couldn't. "
John Lanchester
Because
Think
Painting
" There's an awful lot of us who don't quite speak finance, speak money. "
John Lanchester
Money
Who
Us
" 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
Down
Dead
Back
" 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
Excitement
Personal
Book
" A lot of the time in modern Britain, certainly in urban life, we barely have any contact at all with the people around us. "
John Lanchester
Life
Time
People
" 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
Sound
Think
Big
" The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones. "
John Lanchester
Economics
Good Times
Restaurant
" 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
Go
Way
Taste
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Done
Writing
Phone
" 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
Want
Move
Work
" My mother was very proud of being Irish and being a Gunnigan in a straightforward way. "
John Lanchester
Straightforward
Way
Proud
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Food
Touch
Competition
" I've always been interested in rootedness - mainly, I suppose, because I had very little experience of it. "
John Lanchester
Experience
Little
Had
" I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth. "
John Lanchester
Birth
Believe
Very
" By the time I was three years old, I'd lived at 10 different addresses in six different countries. "
John Lanchester
Different
Lived
Old
" 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. "
John Lanchester
World
Pretty
Somewhere
" My standard Nando's order is a chicken breast burger served 'medium,' which is still fairly spicy. "
John Lanchester
Standard
Order
Chicken
" 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
Humanity
You
Think
" 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
Poetry
Money
Space
" For a while, I had a rule of no smartphone in bed, but now I've upgraded to no smartphone in the bedroom. The fact that we need rules shows how much these things have invaded our lives. "
John Lanchester
Now
Bed
Bedroom
" During the 20th century, the greatest danger to European stability was Germany's sense of its special destiny. During the 21st century, the greatest danger to European stability is Germany's reluctance to accept its special destiny. "
John Lanchester
Accept
Special
Sense
" 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
Building
Sound
Horror
" 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
Sky
Buildings
Food
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Heroes
Real
Restaurant
" '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
Real
Reality
Word
" 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. "
John Lanchester
Good
Job
Words
" 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
Time
Work
Money
" 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
Nice
You
Welcome
" France and Britain have large culinary differences, but one thing they do share is a relatively low tolerance for modernist cooking. "
John Lanchester
Tolerance
France
Cooking