British - Journalist | February 25, 1962 -
My mother was very proud of being Irish and being a Gunnigan in a straightforward way.
John Lanchester
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I rather envy writers who do variations on a theme. I like reading those books, but in practice, I can't do it.
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I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth.
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There is a moral underpinning to economics. And the kinds of questions that it asks and the kinds of solutions it proposes do seem to me to belong in a more humanistic framework.
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I have a horror of going down dead ends, which you can easily do with a novel, spending months on it and then realising that it's all wrong. It's demoralising, because you don't get the time back.
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Once you learn to 'speak' money - which is what I felt I did through the research that led me to write 'Whoops!' - you start to see it at work all around you. It's like a language, a code written on the surface of things; it's in flow all around us, all the time.
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I think 'community,' in the sense in which politicians use, it is largely a cant term.
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A lot of the time in modern Britain, certainly in urban life, we barely have any contact at all with the people around us.
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I love short stories, but I've never had the impulse to write one. Same for ghost stories.
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I think smartphones are one of humanity's most remarkable creations: computers are amazing enough, but a supercomputer you can carry in your pocket and communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere... it's no wonder they're troublingly addictive.
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I'd like to pretend to be all Olympian and above it, as if this is a phenomenon I'm observing from a great height, nothing to do with my own behavior at all - but the fact is I'm absolutely one of those people in the cafe staring at my phone.
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For a while, I had a rule of no smartphone in bed, but now I've upgraded to no smartphone in the bedroom. The fact that we need rules shows how much these things have invaded our lives.
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