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"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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Exlpore more Writing quotes
"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."
"Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope-and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing-that I shall draw a letter that begins, 'Dear Mr. Hitchens, it seems that you are unaware that It is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with 'the reader.' And there's no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already.It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so."
"The name of a great writer is usually bigger than the title of his book. Both literally and figuratively."
"It is said that you can't write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can't read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well.....problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read."
"By applying their observational abilities along with full appliance of their logic and creative powers, writers attempt to create mental maps to share with other people regarding what they learned, think, and believe. The writer's vision can sway readers emotional state and in doing influence what they believe and how they behave."
"Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going."
"There are days when writing is within my power and a story unfolds along a course I've already chosen. And then there are days when the words breathe on their own and take me by the hand, leading me along unfathomed paths. Either way, the end result is this author's fairytale."
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."
"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."
"As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?"
"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."
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