Quotes by John Lanchester - Page 3

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 / Journalist
Code
Flow
Research
Time Work Money
Work Time Money
Led
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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 / Journalist
Abstract
Bad Things
Mistake
Accept
Bank
File
Happening
Hardwired
Least
Obligations
Suddenly
Technical
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Somebody told me ... that he overheard a banker's wife saying her husband was working for free this year-this was 2009. What she meant was, he was just getting his basic salary of £300,000, and no bonus. Their sense of entitlement is, in the proper sense of the word, psychotic.
John Lanchester / Journalist
Business
Husband
Years
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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 / Journalist
Pizza
Premises
Restaurants
Work Money World
Eaten
Overlap
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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 / Journalist
Bits
Clear
Common
Common Good
Interest
Privacy
Qualified
Rights
Safe
Security
Surveillance
Thrill
Tools
General
Electronic
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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 / Journalist
Epic
Excitement
Intimate
Rings
Tone
Adventures
Scale
Hobbit
Lord Of The Rings
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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 / Journalist
Prosperity
Money Enough People
Achieved
Continually
Money People Enough
Societies
Realise
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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 / Journalist
Leaving
Loss
Time Way Never
Capital
Ideal
Properly
So Much Time
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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 / Journalist
Developing
Sorry
Aspirations
Developing World
Earn
Reply
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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 / Journalist
Hundred
Work Me People
Badly
Banker
Cent
Work Father Me
Per
Skewed
Slightly
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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 / Journalist
New York
Dangerous
Holiday
Interaction
Remember
Thinking
Student
Wrong
Either
Suddenly
Travelled
York
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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 / Journalist
Application
Ideas
Industry
Moral
Peasants
Taken
Thinking
Understand
Idea
Dead
Crossed
Far
Instinctive
Instinctively
Insurance Industry
Life Insurance
Line
Market
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It can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a memory, a fantasy, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark.
John Lanchester / Journalist
Inspiration
Memories
Prayer
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Richness, the ideas of having plenty of money, is not ... an absolute state. Richness is about the amount of money you have compared to the people you see around you. It is about where you are in relation to others, and where they are in relation to you ... and whether you can have the things you want and other people have.
John Lanchester / Journalist
Ideas
People
Want
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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 / Journalist
Business
Being Nice
Dominant
Hard
Hospitality
Impression
Nice
Restaurant Business
Significant
Single
Welcome
Feel
Being
Area
Them
Idea
Central
Define
Entire
Particularly
Involves
Lapse
Making
Meal
Mostly
Notice
Precisely
Restaurant
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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 / Journalist
Euro
Monetary
Monetary Policy
Unwilling
According
German
Correct
Primarily
Structural
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It has been a masterful fight-back by the big banks. We the paying public can't do anything much except admit defeat and settle back for the next set of bills. In the meantime, perhaps, we should try and think of a name for the new economic system, which certainly isn't capitalism ... The most accurate term would probably be "bankocracy".
John Lanchester / Journalist
Fighting
Names
Thinking
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