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"The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's."
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Exlpore more Melancholy quotes
"Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes."
"Before the house-maid had lit the fire the next day, or the sun gained any power over the cold, gloomy morning in January, Marianne, only half dressed, was kneeling against one of the window-seats for the sake of all the little light she could command from it, and writing as fast as a continual flow of tears would permit her."
"Do tears not yet spilledwait in small lakes?Or are they invisible riversthat run toward sadness?"
"Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking."
"Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy."
"I enjoy melancholic music and art. They take me to places I don't normally get to go."
"Darkness all around, smoke in between my fingers, all you have given me dear, sorrow and sadness to sing here."
"There is a melancholy that stems from greatness."
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."
"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."
"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 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."
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