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"I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood."
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"The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone."
"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other."
"There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness."
"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."
"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones."
"If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people."
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."
"Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do."
"You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing 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."
"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."
"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 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."
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