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"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."
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"I don't have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind."
"Some books mirror reality while others are entirely fantasy. My favorite are those that manage to weave both into a world."
"It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks."
"When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask."
"Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid."
"There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction."
"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books."
Explore more quotes by Jonathan Coe
"As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?"
"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."
"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."
"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."
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