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Jonathan Coe Quotes

English author and academic, Birth: 19-8-1961 Jonathan Coe Quotes
1.
I like the rain before it falls. of course there is no such thing, she said. That's why it's my favorite. Something can still make you happy, can't it, even if it isn't real.
Jonathan Coe

2.
I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.
Jonathan Coe

3.
The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me.
Jonathan Coe

4.
Objectivity is just male subjectivity.
Jonathan Coe

5.
Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are.
Jonathan Coe

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6.
We say, 'Shall we meet for a drink?', as though drinking were the main end of the appointment, and the matter of company only incidental, we are so shy about admitting our need for one another.[...]We say, 'Would you like to come for some coffee?', as though it were less frightening to acknowledge that we are heavily dependent on mildly stimulating drinks, than to acknowledge that we are at all dependent on the companionship of other people.
Jonathan Coe

7.
Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life. Or sometimes I feel that my role is simply to be a spectator to other people's stories, and always to wander away at the most important moment, drifiting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds.
Jonathan Coe

8.
You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.
Jonathan Coe

Quote Topics by Jonathan Coe: Book Writing People Two Country Sides Political Thinking Fall Ideas Littles Wife Rain Real Talent Childhood Contemporary Mad Regret World Kitchen Reason Subjectivity Years Objectivity Guy Human Beings Narrative Accurate Speaks Out
9.
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 personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it.
Jonathan Coe

10.
Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me - but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe it wouldn't.
Jonathan Coe

11.
But I have always - ever since The Accidental Woman - written novels about individuals attempting to make choices in the context of situations over which they have no control.
Jonathan Coe

12.
The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.
Jonathan Coe

13.
Some people don't realize that a straight 'No' can be the kindest answer in the world.
Jonathan Coe

14.
Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem.
Jonathan Coe

15.
For many weeks after [my wife] died, I could not get used to the feeling of coldness and lifelessness on her side of the bed - and it was even worse when they took the body away and buried her.
Jonathan Coe

16.
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: it's too cynical, too knowing, too ironic, too empty of real value and meaning.
Jonathan Coe

17.
The plain fact is that she never really liked me, and never wanted me. I had been a mistake; and that, to some extent, is what I remain in my own eyes, to this day. The knowledge never goes, can never be undone. You just have to find a way to live with it.
Jonathan Coe

18.
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 the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic.
Jonathan Coe

19.
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 alone settle down to the process of writing.
Jonathan Coe

20.
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 never saw a cent from any of it.
Jonathan Coe

21.
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 wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.
Jonathan Coe

22.
I was mainly in a state of nervousness while I wrote it - nervousness that it was far bigger and more complicated than anything Id attempted before, and that maybe my talent just wasnt up to it and the book would have to be abandoned, or would turn out not to work at all when it was finished.
Jonathan Coe

23.
Thatcherism has become bigger than she ever was.
Jonathan Coe

24.
As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?
Jonathan Coe

25.
I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history.
Jonathan Coe

26.
Well, I like the rain before it falls.
Jonathan Coe

27.
It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.
Jonathan Coe

28.
I had no sense of any reputation that What a Carve Up! might acquire - at the time I didnt even have a publisher, so my main worry was whether it was even going to see the light of day or not.
Jonathan Coe

29.
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 away now, and we dont see her much on the political landscape in this country, shes kind of disappeared and she doesnt speak out much anymore.
Jonathan Coe

30.
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 novels.
Jonathan Coe

31.
I was going to say 'my friend Stuart', but I suppose he's not a friend any more. I seem to have lost a number of friends in the last few years. I don't mean that I've fallen out with them, in any dramatic way. We've just decided not to stay in touch. And that's what it's been: a decision, a conscious decision, because it's not difficult to stay in touch with people nowadays, there are so many different ways of doing it. But as you get older, I think that some friendships start to feel increasingly redundant. You just find yourself asking, "What's the point?" And then you stop.
Jonathan Coe

32.
But you can try to read books at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons.
Jonathan Coe