“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
“It doesn’t thrill me to bits that the state has to use the tools of electronic surveillance to keep us safe, but it seems clear to me that it does, and that our right to privacy needs to be qualified, just as our other rights are qualified, in the interest of general security and the common good.”
― 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
“My standard Nando’s order is a chicken breast burger served ‘medium,’ which is still fairly spicy.”
― John Lanchester
“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.”
― John Lanchester
“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
“’Dead peasants insurance’ is a term that sounds as if it comes straight out of Monty Python. If only that were true.”
― John Lanchester
“Rising inequality is not a law of nature – it’s not even a law of economics. It is a consequence of political and economic arrangements, and those arrangements can be changed.”
― John Lanchester
“Tapas is one of the world’s most civilised drinking and eating traditions.”
― 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
“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
“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
“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
“The first ATM in Hong Kong was actually at the foot of the bank. I remember my father using it. And I find it absolutely terrifying that – something about the way the machine just kind of coughed up money with no difficulty.”
― John Lanchester
“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
“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
“’Fine dining.’ I’d love to know who coined the term and whether they meant it to be as offputting as it is. The words evoke an idea of phoney refinement, of needless flummery, snooty waiters, and an atmosphere designed to intimidate the customer.”
― John Lanchester
“There’s an awful lot of us who don’t quite speak finance, speak money.”
― 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
“A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won’t leave me alone.”
― John Lanchester
“The truth is, it is hard to know where ideas come from.”
― John Lanchester
“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
“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.”
― John Lanchester
“’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
“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
“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
“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
“When I first travelled to New York in 1982 on a summer holiday as a student, I remember thinking how exciting it was, how energising it felt, and also how it felt dangerous – it was a place where you could make a wrong turn, either geographically or just in a human interaction, and suddenly find yourself in trouble.”
― John Lanchester
“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.”
― 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
“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
“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
“Some things get clearer as you look back on them.”
― 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 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
“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 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
“I remember, the first few years here, I didn’t like London much: too big, too crowded, the physical difficulty of getting around.”
― John Lanchester
“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.”
― John Lanchester
“My mum had this amazing ability to deflect things, and from an early age, I knew what I was not supposed to talk about.”
― John Lanchester
“My mother was very proud of being Irish and being a Gunnigan in a straightforward way.”
― 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
“I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth.”
― 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
“There is a moral underpinning to economics. And the kinds of questions that it asks and the kinds of solutions it proposes do seem to me to belong in a more humanistic framework.”
― 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
“I think ‘community,’ in the sense in which politicians use, it is largely a cant term.”
― John Lanchester
“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
“I love short stories, but I’ve never had the impulse to write one. Same for ghost stories.”
― John Lanchester
“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
“I’d like to pretend to be all Olympian and above it, as if this is a phenomenon I’m observing from a great height, nothing to do with my own behavior at all – but the fact is I’m absolutely one of those people in the cafe staring at my phone.”
― 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
“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.”
― 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
“Why should the idea of Western liberal democracy automatically imply unregulated free-market capitalism?”
― 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
“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
“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
“I love London in the rare parts of the year when it’s quiet, and no time is more reliably quiet than the week between Christmas and New Year.”
― John Lanchester
“I’m a huge fan of Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies – I went to all three of them on the day they opened and have seen all of them several times since.”
― John Lanchester
“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
“’Whoops!’ was a spin-off from ‘Capital.’ I had the research and wanted to place it somewhere.”
― 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’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.”
― John Lanchester
“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.”
― John Lanchester
“You can’t explain collateralized debt obligation in a novel – it’s too draggy.”
― John Lanchester
“Fact doesn’t have to be plausible; it just has to be fact.”
― John Lanchester
“Dad was a very, very principled man, and he hated any kind of story where the baddies get away with it.”
― John Lanchester
“I’ve always been interested in rootedness – mainly, I suppose, because I had very little experience of it.”
― 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
“By the time I was three years old, I’d lived at 10 different addresses in six different countries.”
― 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
“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
“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.”
― 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
“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
“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
“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
“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 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.”
― John Lanchester
“In my view, a review should be like talking to a friend who’s just asked you, ‘What was it like?’ You’re giving a verdict on an experience, not trying for a definitive last judgment.”
― John Lanchester
“In a democracy, people tend to get the kind of government they deserve.”
― 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
“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
“’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.”
― 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
“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
“Germany has to put the broader European interest on the same level as its own national interest, or the euro is toast.”
― John Lanchester
“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.”
― John Lanchester
“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
“The early-’80s recession was good for good restaurants, not least because it put bad ones out of business.”
― John Lanchester
“Is it OK to admit to being slightly obsessed with the TV programme ‘Great British Menu?’”
― John Lanchester
“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
“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 economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones.”
― 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
“Most British tapas bars aren’t bars at all. They’re restaurants that specialise in tapas. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s a bit different from the Spanish way of doing things, in which tapas is an adjunct to the drinks and the general vibe.”
― John Lanchester
“Celebrity farmer. Now there’s a phrase that should be an oxymoron. There are farmers on both sides of my family, and I can attest that the overlap between the way farmers live, work and think, and celebrity culture, is exactly 0%.”
― John Lanchester
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