List of Jonathan Coe Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

But You Can Try To Read Books At The Wrong Time Or For The Wrong Reasons.

Thatcherism Has Become Bigger Than She Ever Was.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.