Money is like poetry because both involve learning to communicate in a compressed language that packs a lot of meaning and consequence into the minimum semantic space. John Lanchester Read Quote
The ‘stuff’ in novels touches on every aspect of the world and people’s lives. That’s what makes it so remarkable just how little there is in the novel about the world of money. John Lanchester Read Quote
I’m a huge fan of Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies – I went to all three of them on the day they opened and have seen all of them several times since. John Lanchester Read Quote
If European monetary policy is run according to German interests, huge structural imbalances will accumulate. The Germans will then either have to pay to correct those imbalances or agree that the euro should not be run primarily according to German interests. If they are unwilling to do either of those things, the euro can’t survive. John Lanchester Read Quote
Most people find they have to worry about money; if you don’t ever, then in some fundamental way, you are cut off from most people. John Lanchester Read Quote
The Big Short’ is, among other things, a blistering, detailed indictment of the way Wall Street does business, and its particular villains are the investment banks. John Lanchester Read Quote
Security is a complicated idea and one with an immense potential to trap us – that was one lesson I learnt from my father. John Lanchester Read Quote
We should all know our family’s story, all the more so if nobody tells it to us directly and we have to find it out for ourselves. John Lanchester Read Quote
I grew up mainly in the Far East, where my father worked for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, which was then a small, well-run colonial institution and not the global colossus it is today. John Lanchester Read Quote
