Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Some things get clearer as you look back on them.
Sometimes, the only way of doing something is to do it.
Fact doesn't have to be plausible; it just has to be fact.
The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.
There's an awful lot of us who don't quite speak finance, speak money.
In a democracy, people tend to get the kind of government they deserve.
Tapas is one of the world's most civilised drinking and eating traditions.
The seven Ps: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevent Piss-Poor Performance
You can't explain collateralized debt obligation in a novel - it's too draggy.
We wouldn't care so much what people thought of us if we knew how seldom they did.
I think 'community,' in the sense in which politicians use, it is largely a cant term.
My mother was very proud of being Irish and being a Gunnigan in a straightforward way.
Is it OK to admit to being slightly obsessed with the TV programme 'Great British Menu?'
I love short stories, but I've never had the impulse to write one. Same for ghost stories.
The City is, in terms of its basic functioning, a far-off country of which we know little.
A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone.
'Whoops!' was a spin-off from 'Capital.' I had the research and wanted to place it somewhere.
It's as if people used the invention of seat belts as an opportunity to take up drunk driving.
The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones.
By the time I was three years old, I'd lived at 10 different addresses in six different countries.
My standard Nando's order is a chicken breast burger served 'medium,' which is still fairly spicy.
Dad was a very, very principled man, and he hated any kind of story where the baddies get away with it.
Cheap money feels like the most natural thing in the world - if you don't think about why it's so cheap.
Why should the idea of Western liberal democracy automatically imply unregulated free-market capitalism?
The early-'80s recession was good for good restaurants, not least because it put bad ones out of business.
I grew up abroad, and when I first passed through London in the 1970s, it seemed a drab and provincial place.
Economics as a discipline has in effect become the study of capitalism. The two are taken as the same subject.
I rather envy writers who do variations on a theme. I like reading those books, but in practice, I can't do it.
'Dead peasants insurance' is a term that sounds as if it comes straight out of Monty Python. If only that were true.
Germany has to put the broader European interest on the same level as its own national interest, or the euro is toast.
I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth.
My mum had this amazing ability to deflect things, and from an early age, I knew what I was not supposed to talk about.
Security is a complicated idea and one with an immense potential to trap us - that was one lesson I learnt from my father.
A lot of the time in modern Britain, certainly in urban life, we barely have any contact at all with the people around us.
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.
But knowing that you had gone wrong, and knowing how you had gone wrong, were not the same thing as knowing how to put it right.
Photography brought a lot to painting because it forced artists to think about what painting could do that photography couldn't.
I remember, the first few years here, I didn't like London much: too big, too crowded, the physical difficulty of getting around.
The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat.
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.
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.
The person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control.
France and Britain have large culinary differences, but one thing they do share is a relatively low tolerance for modernist cooking.
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.
People would rather earn 60 grand in an area where their neighbours earn 40, than earn 80 in an area where their neighbours earn a hundred.
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.
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.
'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.
In other words, RBS had its origins in a failed speculation, a bail-out, and a financial crash so big it helped destroy Scotland's status as a separate nation.
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.