John Lanchester Quotes

Author Image

John Lanchester

Profession : Journalist

Birth : February 25, 1962

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

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

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

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

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

I think 'community,' in the sense in which politicians use, it is largely a cant term.

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

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

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

John Lanchester

The early-'80s recession was good for good restaurants, not least because it put bad ones out of business.

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

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

John Lanchester

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

John Lanchester

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

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

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

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

John Lanchester

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

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

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