Jonathan Coe Quotes (39 Quotes)

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.

Dickens, obviously, is a great hero.

Well, mainly it's because I'm not a writer who's comfortable with writing about periods that I can't remember firsthand.

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!

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.

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

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

So it was primarily a desire to write about that period in one's life rather than that period in history or in British culture or whatever.

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

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

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.

Revisionist historians are about to get their hands on the Thatcher years, she's probably going to be looked at again because she feels far enough away now, and we don't see her much on the political landscape in this country, she's kind of disappeared and she doesn't speak out much anymore.

Thatcherism has become bigger than she ever was.

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

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

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.

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

I don't know, I don't really have a view about what my contemporaries are doing, except that I enjoy individual writers and so on.

But we are entitled to look for continuity in politics.

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

A biographer has to get as emotionally close to hisher subject as possible otherwise the writing won't come to life at all.

I don't know if England lags behind the States or is ahead of the States. We've finished with the '70s retro chic revival, we've done the '80s retro-chic revival and on to the '90s.

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'm shy of comparisons to Dickens because he's one of the absolute greats and it's silly to compare a contemporary novelist with someone.

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.

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.

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.

I'm trying to write a nonfiction book at the moment, slot it in between the novels, and it really is like wading through quicksand compared to writing fiction.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

So no, I'm pleased if it's been influential for many readers, but at the time I didn't even know that it was going to have any readers.

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.

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

Also I had financial worries because it took four years to write and we were living off my wife's income all that time, which wasn't very great.