Top 15 Jonathan Coe Quotes

Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do.

I’m one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.

As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you’re into politics, aren’t you?

Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that’s my problem.

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

I became quite taken over by Johnson‘s personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.

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.

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

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.

I think it’s also the case that I’m not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it’s more or less all I know about!

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.

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

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

It’s only a drawback in the States, where most people seem to have no real interest in other countries and the notion of a novel which might offer insight into life in the UK doesn’t seem to appeal very widely.

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.