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"Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are."
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"I'm a schoolteacher and a writer. So that's what I do."
"I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best."
"And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them."
"Good writers are of necessity rare."
"The so-called feminist writers were disgusted with me. I did my thing, and so I guess by feminist standards I'm a feminist. That suits me fine."
"I would say the next imminent hot writers are often the writers from the decade before you were born."
"It is one test of a fully developed writer that he reminds us of no one but himself."
Explore more quotes by Jonathan Coe
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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?"
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