John Lanchester is a British author who wrote "The Debt to Pleasure." The novel is a darkly humorous first-person narrative of a highly cultured and sophisticated man who also happens to be a psychopath and a murderer. The book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Book Award in 1996.
The pleasure of anticipation is the most reliable and intense of all; it is, in fact, the only reliable one.
John Lanchester – The Debt to Pleasure
A good heavy book holds you down. It’s an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.
John Lanchester – The Debt to Pleasure
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers…
John Lanchester – The Debt to Pleasure
There is a great deal to be said for traveling alone, and undistracted, in the pursuit of knowledge.
John Lanchester – The Debt to Pleasure
It is impossible to overdo luxury. French proverb. No, it is impossible to overdo chocolate.
John Lanchester – The Debt to Pleasure
I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember.
John Lanchester – The Debt to Pleasure
People who do not love food are always the same people who ‘can take or leave’ love itself.
John Lanchester – The Debt to Pleasure
One of the consolations of old age is the complete shedding of the illusion that you might be any different from how you are.
John Lanchester – The Debt to Pleasure
Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about.
John Lanchester – The Debt to Pleasure
There is no such thing as bad food, only bad chefs.
John Lanchester – The Debt to Pleasure