Explore Quotes by 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life. Or sometimes I feel that my role is simply to be a spectator to other people's stories, and always to wander away at the most important moment, drifiting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds.

Objectivity is just male subjectivity.

The plain fact is that she never really liked me, and never wanted me. I had been a mistake; and that, to some extent, is what I remain in my own eyes, to this day. The knowledge never goes, can never be undone. You just have to find a way to live with it.

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.