Quotes from Jonathan Coe

Whatever else it throws at you, life will always have pleasures to offer. And we should take them.

C' erano poche cose altrettanto intime per lei che curiosare insiemeba qualcuno tra i libri

In quanto a lei, sapeva anche di leggere più di quanto fosse sano, di riporre troppe aspettative nella lettura, di avere una sorta di ossessione nevrotica per la letteratura e i suoi presunti benefici sul piano morale.

For many weeks after [my wife] died, I could not get used to the feeling of coldness and lifelessness on her side of the bed - and it was even worse when they took the body away and buried her.

Live life as it was meant to be lived. Half asleep, preferably. [...] She preferred [...] to go to sleep at once, sleep now being one of the very few aspects of existence for which she felt any degree of enthusiasm [...]

it's their own unplanned words, their own thoughtless gestures and inflections, which have clung to my memory like flies caught on flypaper.

My poverty was always a source of disappointment to her. If only she could have waited a few years

I live and breathe art",' said Phoebe. ' "What other people refer to as 'the real world' has always seemed pale and insipid by comparison".

We've got to squash this dewy-eyed belief that people can be motivated by anything other than money.

Do you work out, Michael? Attend a gym, or anything like that?' 'No. Why do you ask?' 'It's just that you have unusually firm buttocks. For a writer, that is. It was the first thing I noticed about you.

Did they have the same worries that I had, these absurd people? Did they have the sort of feelings I would even understand? It wasn't enough to say that they came from a different walk of life. It was more extreme, more final than that: they belonged to a different genre of existence altogether. One which actually horrified me …

It's a reminder that what is inevitable may also be spiritually unendurable, that what is justifiable may be atrocious . . . that, like our Mad Mother Nature, our Mad Father Society is an organization of deaths as well as of lives . . .

For with every snatched glance (I was trying to keep my eyes on the road) I felt that I was being offered a glimpse of something new and unthinkable, something that I had been needlessly denying myself, now, for many years: a future.

Like Hilary (who never watched her own television programmes), Dorothy had no intention of ever consuming the products which she was happy to foist upon an uncomplaining public.

If you sleep, if you dream, you must accept your dreams. It's the role of the dreamer.

If imagination's the lifeblood of the people and thought is our oxygen, then his job's to cut off our circulation and hers is to make sure that we all stay dead from the neck up.

It quite spoiled my war.' 'You say that almost as if you'd been enjoying it,' said Michael. 'But of course I was enjoying it,' said Tabitha, smiling. 'We all were. It's so hard for you young people to understand, I know, but there's nothing like a good war for pulling a country together. Everyone was so nice to each other, for a while. Everything that had divided us suddenly seemed so petty and inconsequential.

In an age when politicians are judged first of all on personality, when the public assumes all of them to be deceitful, and when it's easier and much more pleasurable to laugh about a political issue than to think about it, Johnson's apparent self-deprecating honesty and lack of concern for his own dignity were bound to make him a hit.

Take It and Like It

Interesting little phrase though, isn't it though open marriage? Makes it sound like a drain, or a sewer.

I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.

Os carros são como as pessoas. Movemo-nos em círculos todos os dias, corremos daqui para ali, passamos a centímetros uns dos outros, mas há muito pouco contacto real. Tantos desencontros. Tantos «podia ter sido». É assustador, quando pensamos nisso. Provavelmente, o melhor é não pensar.

Above all, she wondered why anyone would react to the global spread of a virus by buying almost two hundred rolls of toilet paper. Was this really people's darkest fear: that one day, because of a terrible economic crisis, or a crisis of public health, or the onset of climate catastrophe, they might not be able to wipe their bottoms?

For the benefit of this naïf, the movie experts ran through an inventory of all the lost movies they could think of: the eight-hour version of Greed, Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried, about a clown who works in the Nazi concentration camps, the missing reels of The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles's legendary The Other Side of the Wind, The Blockhouse – a Second World War drama starring Peter Sellers