83 Quotes by 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.