Top 52 John Lanchester Quotes
#1. A solicitor had looked up at the sky, swept blue by the wind, and had a sudden sense of religious consolation, a feeling that this life cannot possibly be all, and that it is not possible for consciousness to end with the end of life.
John Lanchester
#2. He had a simple maxim for all competitive or adversarial situations: work out what the other party least wants you to do, and then do it. Relieving your feelings was fun, but the best course of action was to make things as difficult as possible for the person trying to make things difficult for you.
John Lanchester
#3. It's not the fault of ghosts that we are so frightened of them.
John Lanchester
#4. Of seatbelts as an opportunity to take up drunk-driving.
John Lanchester
#5. It was a mystery to Roger how someone he knew so well could be such an impervious, impenetrable stranger.
John Lanchester
#6. He looked as if he he subsisted exclusively on carbohydrates and ill feeling.
John Lanchester
#7. Roger was not personally ambitious; he mainly wanted life not to make too many demands on him.
John Lanchester
#8. In his experience with women, it was difficult to recover once things began to go wrong
once they had unreasonably decided that you were a person with whom they were not under any circumstances ever going to have sex.
John Lanchester
#10. On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger's considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT.
John Lanchester
#11. We wouldn't care so much what people thought of us if we knew how seldom they did.
John Lanchester
#12. All the gold in the world would fit in a cube roughly twenty meters on each side.
John Lanchester
#13. He was aware of the irony that he who prized his freedom and willingness to seek the truth had been happiest when he had a defined purpose, a sense of duty and obligation, and a specific destination in mind.
John Lanchester
#14. London was so rich, and also so green, and somehow so detailed: full of stuff that had been made, and bought, and placed, and groomed, and shaped, and washed clean, and put on display as if the whole city was for sale.
John Lanchester
#15. I myself have always disliked being called a "genius." It is fascinating to notice how quick people have been to intuit this aversion and avoid using the term.
John Lanchester
#16. The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat.
John Lanchester
#17. 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.
John Lanchester
#18. But knowing that you had gone wrong, and knowing how you had gone wrong, were not the same thing as knowing how to put it right.
John Lanchester
#19. In other words, RBS had its origins in a failed speculation, a bail-out, and a financial crash so big it helped destroy Scotland's status as a separate nation.
John Lanchester
#20. You could not spend your entire span of life in thrall to the code of stuff. There was no code of stuff. Stuff was just stuff. You couldn't live by it or for it.
John Lanchester
#21. Arabella was good at making life seem easy, except when she suddenly and dramatically wasn't.
John Lanchester
#22. Sometimes, the only way of doing something is to do it.
John Lanchester
#23. Others were simply possessed by a feeling that they had made a catastrophic mistake. They had made an irreversible error in coming to England, and their lives would never recover - their lives would never again be their lives, but the story of this huge mistake that they had made.
John Lanchester
#24. 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.
John Lanchester
#25. The subject under discussion, economics, purports to be a science. It
John Lanchester
#27. Although he too was heading to work, Shahid was glad he wasn't dragging himself off to some office job. Shahid's view: anybody who had to wear a suit to work died a little inside, every day.
John Lanchester
#28. All the Kamals were fluent in irritation. They loved each other but were almost always annoyed by each other, in ways that were both generalised and existential (why is he like that?) and also highly specific (how hard is it to remember to put the top back on the yoghurt?).
John Lanchester
#30. The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.
John Lanchester
#31. As Confucius says, under some circumstances murder can be forgiven; but unreasonableness never is.
John Lanchester
#32. You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.
John Lanchester
#33. Any flights would be taken business class, since Roger thought that the whole point of having money, if it had to be summed up in a single point, which it couldn't, but if you had to, the whole point of having a bit of money was not to have to fly scum class.
John Lanchester
#34. I've been writing about measurement a lot this year, because I've found that measuring progress is the only way to drive lasting success.
John Lanchester
#35. Humans make their own history, but not under circumstances of their choosing.
John Lanchester
#36. The City is, in terms of its basic functioning, a far-off country of which we know little.
John Lanchester
#37. 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.
John Lanchester
#38. The seven Ps: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevent Piss-Poor Performance
John Lanchester
#39. The words lex monetae are really just a polite Latin way of saying, Suck it, creditors.
John Lanchester
#40. You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. The great flaw in the
John Lanchester
#41. The person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control.
John Lanchester
#42. Shahid was the free spirit of the Kamal family: a dreamer, an idealist, a wanderer on the face of the earth
or, as Ahmed would put it, a lazy fuckwit.
John Lanchester
#43. In an ideal world, one populated by vegetarians and Esperanto speakers, derivatives would be used for one thing only: reducing levels of risk. The list of individual traders who have lost more than a billion dollars at a time betting on derivatives is not short.
John Lanchester
#44. Economics as a discipline has in effect become the study of capitalism. The two are taken as the same subject.
John Lanchester
#45. People would rather earn 60 grand in an area where their neighbours earn 40, than earn 80 in an area where their neighbours earn a hundred.
John Lanchester
#46. London created the Underground, and the Underground created London.
John Lanchester
#47. Somebody told me ... that he overheard a banker's wife saying her husband was working for free this year-this was 2009. What she meant was, he was just getting his basic salary of £300,000, and no bonus. Their sense of entitlement is, in the proper sense of the word, psychotic.
John Lanchester
#48. Most hedge funds fail: 90 percent of all the hedge funds that have ever existed have closed or gone broke.
John Lanchester
#49. Psychology looks at people from the inside. Economics looks at them from the outside.
John Lanchester
#50. The credit crunch was based on a climate (the post-Cold War victory party of free-market capitalism), a problem (the sub-prime mortgages), a mistake (the mathematical models of risk) and a failure, that of the regulators.
John Lanchester
#51. The artist says to the cosmos: All I ask is infinite love-is that so very wrong? And the cosmos doesn't even bother to respond.
John Lanchester
#52. The organization is "committed to improving the state of the world." In practice it is mainly a rich people's club, committed to preserving the existing world order.
John Lanchester
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