John Lanchester famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#People #Care
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

#People #Fifty #Thirty
The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.
-- John Lanchester

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

#Country #Business #Cities
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

#Business #Risk #Esperanto
It's as if people used the invention of seat belts as an opportunity to take up drunk driving.
-- John Lanchester

#Business #Opportunity #People
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 Â£300,000, and no bonus. Their sense of entitlement is, in the proper sense of the word, psychotic.
-- John Lanchester

#Husband #Years #Wife
Sometimes, the only way of doing something is to do it.
-- John Lanchester

#Way #Sometimes
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

#Ideas #People #Want
The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat.
-- John Lanchester

#Democracy #Financial #Existential
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

#Memories #Prayer #Inspiration
The seven Ps: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevent Piss-Poor Performance
-- John Lanchester

#Preparation #Planning #Seven
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

#Knowing #Gone
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

#Worry #Worried #Form
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

#Taken #Class #Would Be

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