83 Quotes by Jonathan Coe

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.

From our perspective, the session was a success.

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!

Someone emailed me and said The Closed Circle reminded them of reading Trollope.

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.

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

I sometimes think that we fiction writers lag behind nonfiction counterparts in adventurousness, willingness to tackle forgotten areas of history but... we get there in the end.

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.