John Lanchester Quotes & Sayings

All the gold in the world would fit in a cube roughly twenty meters on each side. — John Lanchester

It's always the next pay raise, the next purchase, the next place you move to or go on holiday which will make you happy. The credit crunch could have been a moment to reflect on that. We in the West can do something that no people in history have done: we can show the world that we know when we have enough. As the planet runs out of resources, due mainly to the fact that everyone on it wants to live a lifestyle equivalent to those of us in the West, this lesson would have the potential to save the world. — John Lanchester

Frankfurt's big problem is that London is a much more attractive and interesting place to live, especially for the demographic who work in finance: as a former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, put it, Young men want to go out on the pull and do a lot of cocaine, and they can't really do that easily in Frankfurt. — John Lanchester

No, Roger had not seen the funny side. But there had been a moment when, after looking at his watch, he had thought: I can remember when Christmas morning would start at about half past ten with a glass of Buck's Fizz in bed. Now it begins at half past five, with a test of my fine motor skills and ability to read Korean. — John Lanchester

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

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

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

Economics as a discipline has in effect become the study of capitalism. The two are taken as the same subject. — John Lanchester

It's not the fault of ghosts that we are so frightened of them. — John Lanchester

For he that hath, to him shall be given. — John Lanchester

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

Arabella was good at making life seem easy, except when she suddenly and dramatically wasn't. — John Lanchester

As Confucius says, under some circumstances murder can be forgiven; but unreasonableness never is. — John Lanchester

Arabella had a habit of overstating things, one that she had so much internalised that it was not always easy for she herself to tell when she was mildly pleased about something and when she was genuinely delighted. Gresham's Law was at work: the cheap money of overstatement was gradually driving out the good money of true feeling. But she was in this case genuinely pleased. She wanted the changes made to her room and she wanted them soon and was pleased that Bogdan would be able to do them, because, beneath the hyperbole, she liked and trusted him. — John Lanchester

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

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

Psychology looks at people from the inside. Economics looks at them from the outside. — John Lanchester

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

Forbes cost of living extremely well index (CLEWI) An amazing thing I came across while researching the question of just what it is that very very rich people do with their money. As Forbes says, the CLEWI is to the very rich what the CPI is to "ordinary people." There are forty items on it, and they are hilarious, though perhaps you shouldn't show them to your left-wing aunt if she's suffering from high blood pressure: Russian sable fur coats from Bloomingdale's, shirts from Turnbull and Asser, Gucci loafers, handmade John Lobb shoes, a year at Groton boarding school, a yacht, a horse, a pool, a Learjet, a Roller, a case of Dom Perignon, forty-five minutes at a psychiatrist's on the Upper East Side (!), an hour's estate planning with a lawyer, and, amusingly/annoyingly, a year at Harvard.36 In 2012, the CLEWI went up 2.6 percent but the CPI went up only 1.4 percent. — John Lanchester

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

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

Roger was not personally ambitious; he mainly wanted life not to make too many demands on him. — John Lanchester

He looked as if he he subsisted exclusively on carbohydrates and ill feeling. — John Lanchester

And now here was Arabella, making him feel worse. Maybe that was what she always did; maybe she always made him feel worse, and he'd never really noticed before. Maybe what seemed like the ordinary rough-and-tumble of marriage, combined with hard work and London, was something simpler: the fact that added to any equation, Arabella made it worse. — John Lanchester

London created the Underground, and the Underground created London. — John Lanchester

Sometimes, the only way of doing something is to do it. — John Lanchester

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

The seven Ps: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevent Piss-Poor Performance — John Lanchester

The idea of luxury, even the word "luxury," was important to Arabella. Luxury meant something that was by definition overpriced, but was so nice, so lovely, in itself that you did not mind, in fact was so lovely that the expensiveness became part of the point, part of the distinction between the people who could not afford a thing and the select few who not only could, but also understood the desirability of paying so much for it. Arabella knew that there were thoughtlessly rich people who could afford everything; she didn't see herself as one of them but instead as one of an elite who both knew what money meant and could afford the things they wanted; and the knowledge of what money meant gave the drama of high prices a special piquancy. She loved expensive things because she knew what their expensiveness meant. She had a complete understanding of the signifiers. — John Lanchester

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

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

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

Humans make their own history, but not under circumstances of their choosing. — John Lanchester

But the thing which had made him fall for her, fall properly, was the way she seemed so calm and so quiet and so sad. Surrounded by noisy bankers showing off, and their variously pushy or beady or anxious or competitive wives, she seemed to be from somewhere else; a place where people carried their own burdens; a grander and realer and more honourable place. Roger didn't know that Matya spent a lot of that evening thinking about home, but he could tell that she was thinking about something, and it was that other thing which, for him, did it. — John Lanchester

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

Mortgage The word literally means "dead pledge," and if it were called that maybe more people would think twice about getting one. It is a classic example of a financial entity that would scare people off if they thought more clearly about what it is: a highly leveraged form of long-term borrowing with regular demands for cash payment against an illiquid asset that is known to be even more illiquid in difficult times. — John Lanchester

The words lex monetae are really just a polite Latin way of saying, Suck it, creditors. — John Lanchester

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

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

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

If the invention of derivatives was the financial world's modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, parallels the elusive nature of meaning in deconstrucitonism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always 'deferred,' moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings - a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an 'aporia,' from a Greek term meaning 'impasse.' There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect. — John Lanchester

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

Petunia only ever went to the doctor reluctantly, and her motive in doing so was always the same: she did it in order to feel less anxious about things. The doctor was supposed to make the worry go away; she did quite enough worrying without actually having something to worry about. When she came out feeling no less anxious, as this time, something had gone wrong. The basic contract had been broken. — John Lanchester

The economic metaphor came to be applied to every aspect of modern life, especially the areas where it simply didn't belong. In fields such as education, equality of opportunity, health, employee's rights, the social contract and culture, the first conversation to happen should be about values and principles; then you have the conversation about costs, and what you as a society can afford. — John Lanchester

Richness, the ideas of having plenty of money, is not ... an absolute state. Richness is about the amount of money you have compared to the people you see around you. It is about where you are in relation to others, and where they are in relation to you ... and whether you can have the things you want and other people have. — John Lanchester

The City is, in terms of its basic functioning, a far-off country of which we know little. — John Lanchester

It seemed too as if many of the people were on display, behaving as if they expected to be looked at, as if they were on show: so many of them seemed to be wearing costumes, not just policemen and firemen and waiters and shop assistants, but people in their going-to-work costumes, their I'm-a-mother-pushing-a-pram costumes, babies and children in outfits that were like costumes; workers digging holes in their costume-bright orange vests; joggers in jogging costume; even the drinkers in the streets and parks, even the beggars, seemed to be wearing costumes, uniforms. — John Lanchester

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

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

It has been a masterful fight-back by the big banks. We the paying public can't do anything much except admit defeat and settle back for the next set of bills. In the meantime, perhaps, we should try and think of a name for the new economic system, which certainly isn't capitalism ... The most accurate term would probably be "bankocracy". — John Lanchester

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

In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays. — John Lanchester

We wouldn't care so much what people thought of us if we knew how seldom they did. — John Lanchester

Of seatbelts as an opportunity to take up drunk-driving. — John Lanchester

It gave her a sudden sense that it was now her turn to grow old, to find the world changing, sliding away from the old ways of being and behaving, so that you were gradually a stranger to the place you lived in. The woman priest with jogging clothes and a BlackBerry gave Mary a glimpse of what life must have been like for her mother as she grew older. — John Lanchester

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

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

The subject under discussion, economics, purports to be a science. It — John Lanchester

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

Most hedge funds fail: 90 percent of all the hedge funds that have ever existed have closed or gone broke. — John Lanchester

The white policeman was a man who gave an impression of heaviness. It wasn't that he was fat, but he sagged as if with a moral or psychic burden; his shoulders sagged, his eyes sagged, his suit sagged and he sat sagged in his chair, as if his disappointments with the world were bearing down on him. He made it clear that Shahid was one of these disappointments. — John Lanchester

It was a mystery to Roger how someone he knew so well could be such an impervious, impenetrable stranger. — John Lanchester

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac. — John Lanchester

It can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a memory, a fantasy, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark. — John Lanchester

How does the industry seek to master the risks? Through mathematics. The common-sense version of what sophisticated investors do is diversification, a technique so old it's mentioned in the Talmud, where the strategy advocated is to have a third of your assets in trade, a third in cash and a third in land. — John Lanchester

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

You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. The great flaw in the — John Lanchester

Mere adequacy is never adequate. — John Lanchester

It's as if people used the invention — John Lanchester

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

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

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

We fight for autonomy over so many areas of our lives - for decency and democracy and freedom, for suffrage, for the right to have some say over our lives, some control - and then in the central question of what we are to do with our days, with our working lives, we give all that freedom away in return for a pay cheque. And are content to be bored and obedient, resentful and uninvolved and tired. This is such a standard, universally accepted feature of the modern world - that we will dislike and be bored by our work - that we have forgotten to notice that it doesn't make any sense. — John Lanchester