Jonathan Coe Quotes & Sayings

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

As for human contact, I'd lost all appetite for it. Mankind has, as you may have noticed, become very inventive about devising new ways for people to avoid talking to each other and I'd been taking full advantage of the most recent ones. I would always send a text message rather than speak to someone on the phone. Rather than meeting with any of my friends, I would post cheerful, ironically worded status updates on Facebook, to show them all what a busy life I was leading. And presumably people had been enjoying them, because I'd got more than seventy friends on Facebook now, most of them complete strangers. But actual, face-to-face, let's-meet-for-a-coffee-and-catch-up sort of contact? I seemed to have forgotten what that was all about. — Jonathan Coe

The upshot was that she lost her religion - with a vengeance - and walked out on him, taking these three daughters with her. Faith, Hope and Brenda. — Jonathan Coe

None of this made any sense to Benjamin, however hard he tried. Roll-Up Reg was talking another language. But then, he was no more persuaded by the things his parents told him, or the teachers at school. It was the world, the world itself that was beyond his reach, this whole absurdly vast, complex, random, measureless construct, this never-ending ebb and flow of human relations, political relations, cultures, histories . . . How could anyone hope to master such things? It was not like music. Music always made sense. The music he heard that night was lucid, knowable, full of intelligence and humour, wistfulness and energy and hope. He would never understand the world, but he would always love this music. — Jonathan Coe

Your gravity, your grace have turned a tide
In me, no lunar power can reverse;
But in your narcoleptic eyes I spied
A sightlessness tonight: or something worse,
A disregard that made me feel unmanned.
Meanwhile, insomniac, I catch my breath
To think I saw my future traced in sand
One afternoon "as still, as carved, as death,"
And pray for an oblivion so deep
It ends in transformation. Only dawn
Can save me, flood this haunted house of sleep
With light, and drown the thoughts that nightly warn:
Another lifetime is the least you'll need, to trace
The guarded secrets of her gravity, her grace. — 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

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. — Jonathan Coe

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

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. — Jonathan Coe

They sat and drank their pints. The tables in which their faces were dimly reflected were dark brown, the darkest brown, the colour of Bournville chocolate. The walls were a lighter brown, the colour of Dairy Milk. The carpet was brown, with little hexagons of a slightly different brown, if you looked closely. The ceiling was meant to be off-white, but was in fact brown, browned by the nicotine smoke of a million unfiltered cigarettes. Most of the cars in the car park were brown, as were most of the clothes worn by the patrons. Nobody in the pub really noticed the predominance of brown, or if they did, thought it worth remarking upon. These were brown times. — Jonathan Coe

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. — Jonathan Coe

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. — 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

Take It and Like It — 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

Yes, she would have been partial to men, perhaps she might even have confined herself to one man in particular, if only she had been able to find one who shared her view that intimacy between two people was of value irrespective of whether it led to sticky conflux. — Jonathan Coe

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

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

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. — Jonathan Coe

But we are entitled to look for continuity in politics. — Jonathan Coe

Thatcherism has become bigger than she ever was. — Jonathan Coe

You didn't take part, Benjamin?" Gunther asked, as he passed me a plate of cheese and cold meat.
"My brother doesn't play games," said Paul. "He's an aesthete. He sat by the window all afternoon with a funny look on his face: probably composing a tone poem. — Jonathan Coe

These days, every politician is a laughing-stock, and the laughter which occasionally used to illuminate the dark corners of the political world with dazzling, unexpected shafts of hilarity has become an unthinking reflex on our part, a tired Pavlovian reaction to situations that are too difficult or too depressing to think about clearly. — 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

Revisionist historians are about to get their hands on the Thatcher years, shes probably going to be looked at again because she feels far enough away now, and we dont see her much on the political landscape in this country, shes kind of disappeared and she doesnt speak out much anymore. — Jonathan Coe

[ ... ] words are tricky little bastards, and very rarely say what you want them to say [ ... ] — 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

Don't you know what a pussy is, sir?'

'Of course he doesn't. He hasn't even seen Basic Instinct. — Jonathan Coe

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

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

Can you make her out at all?'
Benjamin shrugged. As usual, in Cicely's presence, he was afraid of appearing inarticulate, and as usual, this fear robbed him of his power of speech. — 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

His thoughts-if you can use that word about a dog, particularly one as stupid as Bonaparte-were simply fixed, with absolute determination, upon the distant horizon, and he was not going to stop until he had reached it. — Jonathan Coe

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. — 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

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

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

Well, I like the rain before it falls. — Jonathan Coe

If there was one kind of hat Terry despised above all others, it was the baseball cap. There was nothing wrong with children wearing it, of course, but whenever he saw it on the head of an adult it seemed to symbolize everything that he most hated about America, even more potently than the figure of Mickey Mouse or the latest Coke adverts or the hordes of giant yellow 'M's which were even now beginning to advance across Britain like an unchecked virus. And even worse, Kingsley was wearing it back to front. This, without doubt, was the ultimate badge of imbecility. — 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

You're right, Margaret, absolutely right. Things have changed a lot, even since I've been here. It's a different place now. Better in some ways, worse in others."
"Better!" she echoed, scornfully. — Jonathan Coe

I don't mind summer rain. In fact I like it. It's my favourite sort.' 'Your favourite sort of rain?' said Thea. I remember that she was frowning, and pondering these words, and then she announced: 'Well, I like the rain before it falls. — Jonathan Coe

Yes - I've learned from my mistakes, and I'm sure I could repeat them perfectly. — 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

He was the proud owner of a quite colossal member, which on the many awestruck occasions it had been exposed to public view had been compared variously to a giant frankfurter, an overfed python, a length of led piping, the trunk of a rogue elephant, a barrage balloon, an airport-sized Toblerone and a roll of wet wallpaper. — Jonathan Coe

Well, there'll be an outcry, of course, but then it'll die down and something else will come along for people to get annoyed about. The important thing is that we save ourselves a lot of money, and meanwhile a whole generation of children from working-class or low-income families will be eating nothing but crisps and chocolate every day. Which means, in the end, that they'll grow up physically weaker and mentally slower.' Dorothy raised an eyebrow at this assertion. 'Oh, yes,' he assured her. 'A diet high in sugars lead to retarded brain growth. Our chaps have proved it.' He smiled. 'As every general knows, the secret of winning any war is to demoralize the enemy'. — Jonathan Coe

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. — Jonathan Coe

Live life as it was meant to be lived. Half asleep, preferably.

[...]

She preferred [...] to go to sleep at once, sleep now being one of the very few aspects of existence for which she felt any degree of enthusiasm [...] — Jonathan Coe

[...] these questions gave way, in the course of time, to a different preoccupation, namely, a slow and growing awareness of familiarity with the landscape into which she was being carried. A familiarity based not on the sighting of particular landmarks, but on her feeling that the very contours of the hills and fields, and the very shapes and colours of the buildings, now appeared as surviving monuments to the existence of a much earlier self whom she had long forgotten. She knew, of course, that they could not bring that self back to life, perish the thought, but they reminded her of it in a way which she did not find disagreeable. — Jonathan Coe

Am I the same person that I dream about? — Jonathan Coe

This is the crazed, manic energy of the bull at the end of the fight, fatally wounded but ploughing ahead, driven only by pain and anger and the mindless will to go on living. — Jonathan Coe

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. — 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

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. — Jonathan Coe

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

We say, 'Shall we meet for a drink?', as though drinking were the main end of the appointment, and the matter of company only incidental, we are so shy about admitting our need for one another.

[...]

We say, 'Would you like to come for some coffee?', as though it were less frightening to acknowledge that we are heavily dependent on mildly stimulating drinks, than to acknowledge that we are at all dependent on the companionship of other people. — 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

There's a fine line between forgetting an event, and suppressing the memory of it. — Jonathan Coe

He waited in silence for the blindfold to be tied firmly at the back of his head. 'Right,' said Wilkins, emphatically. 'That should do. How many fingers am I holding up?' 'Three,' said Thomas. 'God damn it to hell, how did you know that? Can you see through the cloth?' 'No. It was a guess.' 'Well you're not supposed to guess. For crying out loud, I'm trying to make sure that you can't see where we're going. We're not here to play guessing games. How many fingers am I holding up?' 'I've no idea. I can't see a bloody thing.' 'Good. It was four, by the way. Not that it matters. Now shut up. — Jonathan Coe

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

Half an hour later, as I was deeply immersed in the story of The Man of the Hill, that curious, lengthy digression which seems to have nothing to do with the main narrative but is in fact its cornerstone.. — Jonathan Coe

Objectivity is just male subjectivity. — Jonathan Coe

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

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. — Jonathan Coe