John Lanchester quotes:

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

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.

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.

It's as if people used the invention of seat belts as an opportunity to take up drunk driving.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?)."

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.

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.

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

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.

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".

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

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