Jonathan Coe Quotes

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.

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

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.

Objectivity is just male subjectivity.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Thatcherism has become bigger than she ever was.

Well, I like the rain before it falls.

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

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

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