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"Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are."
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"There's a certain possessiveness of writers sometimes."
"I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best."
"A lot of our writers, like Conan O'Brien, moved on to other things."
"The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years."
"I would say the next imminent hot writers are often the writers from the decade before you were born."
"A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer."
"I'm a writer, and what I do is write. I wasn't able to do anything else."
Explore more quotes by Jonathan Coe
"My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America they've been far and away my most successful books, but I never saw a cent from any of 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."
"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."
"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."
"I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing."
"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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