John Lanchester Quotes

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John Lanchester

Profession : Journalist

Birth : February 25, 1962

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

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

Cheap money feels like the most natural thing in the world - if you don't think about why it's so cheap.

John Lanchester

There's an awful lot of us who don't quite speak finance, speak money.

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

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

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

Dad was a very, very principled man, and he hated any kind of story where the baddies get away with it.

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

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