159 Quotes by 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.

Celebrity farmer. Now there's a phrase that should be an oxymoron. There are farmers on both sides of my family, and I can attest that the overlap between the way farmers live, work and think, and celebrity culture, is exactly 0%.

I remember, the first few years here, I didn't like London much: too big, too crowded, the physical difficulty of getting around.

My mum had this amazing ability to deflect things, and from an early age, I knew what I was not supposed to talk about.

My mother was very proud of being Irish and being a Gunnigan in a straightforward way.

I rather envy writers who do variations on a theme. I like reading those books, but in practice, I can't do it.

I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth.

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.

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.