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"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."
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"Success is subjective. Your dream bank balance could be someone else's nightmare."
"You know you made it, when people you know, tell people they know, that you know them."
"Sometimes the difference between success and failure is simply the degree to which you crave one over the other."
"As a character I am dead, as a writer I am not."
"You don't need notes... you either do it ... or you either you don't do it."
"This age is interested in success, not suffering . . . Our Lord was ridiculed, insulted, persecuted, and eventually killed. In the face of opposition, He went about “doing good."
"Feeling is the consciousness of the resulting conditions - of success, failure, equilibrium, compromise or balance, in this continuous rivalry of ideas."
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."
"Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do."
"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 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!"
"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."
"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?"
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