Jonathan Coe Quotes

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

  Jonathan Coe

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

  Jonathan Coe

• They were written in the early ’90s when I was strapped for cash.

  Jonathan Coe

• 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

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

  Jonathan Coe

• 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

• Thatcherism has become bigger than she ever was.

  Jonathan Coe

• 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

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

  Jonathan Coe

• 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.

  Jonathan Coe

• 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

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

  Jonathan Coe

• 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!

  Jonathan Coe

• 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

• 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

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

  Jonathan Coe

• But we are entitled to look for continuity in politics.

  Jonathan Coe

• 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

• 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

• 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

Jonathan Coe (23)

Birth:	19th August, 1961
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Novelist

About

Jonathan Coe was born in Bromsgrove, England. He is an English novelist. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. He taught at the University of Warwick, where he completed an MA and a PhD in English Literature. He has written several novels include: The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death, What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep (Prix Médicis étranger Award), The Rotters' Club, The Closed Circle, The Rain Before It Falls, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, Expo 58, and Number 11. His Non-fiction works include: Humphrey Bogart: Take it & Like it, and Like a Fiery Elephant (Baillie Gifford Prize).

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