top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Talent quotes
"Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions."
"We're all geniuses. Life is merely overpopulated with singers who play drums, and, drummers who sing, to pay rent."
"There is only one school of literature - that of talent."
"Certain abilities in you sometimes yearn to be expressed."
"That boy is talented. You don't develop those gifts in houses or in schools."
Explore more quotes by Jonathan Coe
"Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do."
"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!"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
bottom of page