John Lanchester Quotes

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John Lanchester

Profession : Journalist

Birth : February 25, 1962

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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'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

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