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"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."
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"The condition you're in at this moment is the product of your previous thoughts, to change your condition, change your thoughts."
Personal Development

"Instead of clinging to the only Lifeboat that can save, we have tossed overboard biblical truths in the name of [compromise], living on the edge of life, like the man who rides the parameter of a hurricane, daring it to sweep him away."

"There is always a path to our target, the problem is to discover it!"

"From a cleansed conscience emerges a changed life."

"Simple things have greater power than the complicated things!"

"If he did not speak his tale, it grew dank and musty, it shrank inside him, while with the telling the tale stayed fresh and virtuous."

"Abundance in life comes from generosity."

"To live in bliss, love everything, including people, unconditionally."
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."

"Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do."

"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."

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

"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!"

"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."

"As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?"

"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."
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