Jonathan Coe Novelist Quotations

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.

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.

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!

Also I had financial worries because it took four years to write and we were living off my wife's income all that time, which wasn't very great.

I don't know, I don't really have a view about what my contemporaries are doing, except that I enjoy individual writers and so on.

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

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.

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.

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.