Top 40 Jonathan Coe Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Well, I like the rain before it falls.”

— Jonathan Coe

2. “Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that’s my problem.”

— Jonathan Coe

3. “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

4. “I’m one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.”

— Jonathan Coe

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “Objectivity is just male subjectivity.”

— Jonathan Coe

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “Some people don’t realize that a straight ‘No’ can be the kindest answer in the world.”

— Jonathan Coe

15. “And so they sit at home, getting fat on the proceedings and here we all are. Our businesses are failing, our jobs disappearing, our countryside choking, our hospitals crumbling, our homes being repossessed, our bodies being poisoned, our minds shutting down, the whole bloody spirit of the country crushed and fighting for breath. I hate the Winshaws, Fiona. Just look what they’ve done to us. Look what they’ve done to you.”

— Jonathan Coe

16. “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

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

— Jonathan Coe

18. “The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson’s.”

— Jonathan Coe

19. “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

20. “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

21. “As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you’re into politics, aren’t you?”

— Jonathan Coe

22. “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

23. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

24. “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

25. “Thatcherism has become bigger than she ever was.”

— Jonathan Coe

26. “Well, he and his wife had both been devout evangelicals for a while. They had these two kids and then she had an incredible job giving birth to the next one. 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

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

— Jonathan Coe

28. “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

29. “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

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

— Jonathan Coe

31. “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

32. “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

33. “Am I the same person that I dream about?”

— Jonathan Coe

34. “As you get older, the hopes get smaller and the regrets get bigger. The challenge is to fight it. To stop the regrets from taking over.”

— Jonathan Coe

35. “Here I sat down and closed my eyes, tilting my face towards the sun and listening to the gentle lap of the blue water against the rocks. Perhaps it was my destiny, after all, to be always alone: that was the tragic, self-dramatizing thought that came to me, and in some paradoxical way it also brought me a kind of comfort, reconciling me to what seemed, at that moment, to be my essential nature: introverted, melancholy and solitary.”

— Jonathan Coe

36. “In circumstances this desperate there is only one thing that can console me. I always keep at least three different kinds of Brie in the kitchen for emergency situations.”

— Jonathan Coe

37. “So as well as hating you, they also hate them – whoever they are – these faceless people who are sitting in judgement over them somewhere, legislating on what they can and can’t say out loud.”

— Jonathan Coe

38. “Politics can make people do terrible things.”

— Jonathan Coe

39. “Billy might have known it for several months by now, and I might only just have begun to grasp it, but we had both come to the same realization: the realization that what we had to give, nobody really wanted any more.”

— Jonathan Coe

40. “C’ erano poche cose altrettanto intime per lei che curiosare insiemeba qualcuno tra i libri.”

— Jonathan Coe

41. “My daughter was right: young people do not notice the feelings of their parents, are not even aware that they have feelings, most of the time. They live in a blissful state of sociopathy, as far as their parents’ emotions are concerned.”

— Jonathan Coe

42. “Whatever else it throws at you, life will always have pleasures to offer. And we should take them.”

— Jonathan Coe

43. “The gods would be moving on, in other words; and I, a mere mortal, would be left behind, forgotten.”

— Jonathan Coe

44. “My poverty was always a source of disappointment to her. If only she could have waited a few years.”

— Jonathan Coe

45. “You know she wanted you to vote the other way. It’s her future, you know. She’s the one who’s going to be around the longest.”

— Jonathan Coe