159 Quotes by John Lanchester

I've always been interested in rootedness - mainly, I suppose, because I had very little experience of it.

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.

I don't think quantitative easing is deliberately misleading, but I do think it's suspiciously bland and reassuring. It doesn't sound like anything big, experimental, scary and strange - which is what many economists think it is.

'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.

By the time I was three years old, I'd lived at 10 different addresses in six different countries.

'Dead peasants insurance' is a term that sounds as if it comes straight out of Monty Python. If only that were true.

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.

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.

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.