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"Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem."
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Exlpore more Talent quotes
"There is only one school of literature - that of talent."
"There is a difference between talented people and gifted people.Talented people are good AT something, Gifted people ARE that something."
"You need to find your gift, something you are doing better than others."
"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."
"With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy."
"If you have the ability to see the things behind the scenes, then you have the greatest talent one can ever have because there is almost always something else behind the things!"
Explore more quotes by Jonathan Coe
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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!"
"You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it."
"As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?"
"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."
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