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"Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are."
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"I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best."
"I think Juan stopped short - he got halfway to the destination and got off the train. He is certainly an excellent writer and a good person, but I'm not a nationalist."
"I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer."
"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."
"How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator."
"A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer."
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."
"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."
"Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do."
"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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