159 Quotes by John Lanchester

Customers deposit money in a bank for interest; the bank lends that money to other people at a higher rate of interest. This isn’t glamorous or interesting, but then banking is not supposed to resemble base jumping or hip-hop.

It was a rule of London life that anybody could be anybody.

The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat.

As so often with the ideologically committed free marketer, there is no sense that he’s actually thinking about what he’s saying; he’s merely adumbrating arguments towards a conclusion he reached in advance.

In Shahid’s view, the best way through difficult times, as through life in general, was just to go along with things. It was a rare problem that couldn’t be solved by being ignored.

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.

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.

We don't want to think about money in an ideal life; in a well-lived life, money wouldn't be one of our primary concerns, and we prefer to adopt the ostrich position.

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.