159 Quotes by John Lanchester

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.

I think 'community,' in the sense in which politicians use, it is largely a cant term.

A lot of the time in modern Britain, certainly in urban life, we barely have any contact at all with the people around us.

I love short stories, but I've never had the impulse to write one. Same for ghost stories.

I think smartphones are one of humanity's most remarkable creations: computers are amazing enough, but a supercomputer you can carry in your pocket and communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere... it's no wonder they're troublingly addictive.

For a while, I had a rule of no smartphone in bed, but now I've upgraded to no smartphone in the bedroom. The fact that we need rules shows how much these things have invaded our lives.

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.

In sport, the money goes to the talent; it goes directly to the worker - unlike a bank, which sits in the middle of transactions and whose income bears no relation to any of the services it provides.

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.