Jonathan Coe Quotes

35 quotes in 634 categories

• I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let…
• I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.
• Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem.
• As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?
• As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in…
• But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into…
• But I have always - ever since The Accidental Woman - written novels about individuals attempting to make choices in the context of situations over…
• Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me - but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe…
• I live a perfectly happy and comfortable life in Blair's Britain, but I can't work up much affection for the culture we've created for ourselves:…
• I was mainly in a state of nervousness while I wrote it - nervousness that it was far bigger and more complicated than anything Id…
• I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history.
• Revisionist historians are about to get their hands on the Thatcher years, shes probably going to be looked at again because she feels far enough…
• I had no sense of any reputation that What a Carve Up! might acquire - at the time I didnt even have a publisher, so…
• The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest…
• You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.
• The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.
• Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are.
• It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.
• As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was…
• My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America they've been far and away my most successful books, but I…

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