A biography for John Lanchesterhasn’t been written yet.
“Inequality in the developed world fell for most of the 20th century; we can make it fall for most of the 21st century, too. But it won't happen without sustained pressure on politicians from electorates.”
“At the risk of being old-fartish, I like old-school wines that taste the way the winemaker intended, as opposed to organic and untreated ones with more bottle variation. If I want to take a risk, I'll go bungee-jumping.”
“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.”
“Fact doesn't have to be plausible; it just has to be fact.”
“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.”
“I've always been interested in rootedness - mainly, I suppose, because I had very little experience of it.”
“You can't explain collateralized debt obligation in a novel - it's too draggy.”
“The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.”
“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.”
“There's an awful lot of us who don't quite speak finance, speak money.”
“Now that I'm an adult and have a big say in what we eat on Christmas Day, turkey doesn't even make it on to the starting grid for consideration. It isn't just my least favourite meat; it's my least favourite protein.”
“Security is a complicated idea and one with an immense potential to trap us - that was one lesson I learnt from my father.”