Quotes from John Lanchester

It's that great British middle-class battle cry: "Something must be done!

and even had sex once or twice. Death and sex—close companions.

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

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

No lo ví venir. Un momento antes: todo, ya sabes: Londres.

Note that as the cost of beans goes up, the cost of your cup might actually go down, if your favorite café switches from the more expensive, subtler arabica beans to the cheaper, stronger robusta variety. This happened in lots of places during the great coffee-bean price spike of 2010–11, so if you started noticing a few years ago that your morning espresso was making you gibber, that's probably the reason.

In economics, models are spoken of as being made of physics when in truth they are made of Lego. They have that degree of provisionality and tentativeness and, importantly, rebuildability. There's a permanent invitation to take them apart and put them together again in a form that works better.

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

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.

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.

We wouldn't care so much what people thought of us if we knew how seldom they did...To Mr Phillips, the fact of others' indifference has never brought any comfort.

I've never seen any subscriber to neo-liberal economics admit the fact, but part of the way in which inequality drives economic progress – in the neo-liberal system – is by making it clear that there are severe consequences for failure. Bankruptcies, dole queues, even people sleeping in the streets; all these are human tragedies, but in the neo-liberal world view, they are also reminders of what happens if you don't work hard enough.

But maybe, now that I was one of them, they weren't Others anymore? If I was an Other and they were Others perhaps none of us were Others but instead we were a new Us. It was confusing.

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.

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

It might now be the occasion to remember that for the Romans, a barbarian was someone who wore trousers, had a beard and ate butter.)

In Polish, the language of Poland, all green vegetables are known as w?oszczyzna, which means 'things Italian

It made sense: we were Others now.

Longevity can be a form of spite. I am an old man myself now, and I recognise the symptoms.

The person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control.

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

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.

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.

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.