Quotes from Jonathan Coe

Aveva degli occhi azzurri penetranti e intelligenti che avrebbero certamente inchiodato i miei con la forza e la fissità del loro sguardo, se io non li avessi deliberatamente evitati, preferendo soffermarmi sulla carnagione leggermente screziata e sui suoi folti capelli ramati.

Language is a traitor, a double agent who sleeps across borders without warning in the dead of night. It is a heavy snowfall in a foreign country, which hides the shapes and contours of reality beneath a cloak of nebulous whiteness. It is a crippled dog, never quite able to perform the tricks we ask of it. It is a ginger biscuit, dunked for too long in the tea of our expectations, crumbling and dissolving into nothingness. It is a lost continent.

cuando Gill salió del coche aquella mañana tan fría, consciente de su ausencia definitiva, la invadió la mayor sensación de soledad que recordaba haber tenido nunca.

Forse c'è qualcosa di più intimo e segreto da scoprire nel volto di una persona addormentata che in un corpo nudo

A disease, Terry - the most widespread and life-curtailing disease of all! Forget cancer, forget multiple sclerosis, forget AIDS. If you spend eight hours a day in bed, then sleep is shortening your life by a third! That's the equivalent of dying at the age of fifty - and it's happening to all of us. This is more than just a disease: this is a plague! And none of us is immune, you realize.

This is great,' said Terry. 'This is so much better than sitting in my room watching Written on the Wind.

The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it...

E così loro stanno tranquilli nelle loro case a rimpinguare profitti, e noi siamo tutti qui. I nostri affari sono un fallimento, i posti di lavoro si assottigliano, gli ospedali vanno a pezzi, le campagne sono allo stremo, le nostre case confiscate, i nostri corpi avvelenati, le nostre menti all'ammasso, tutto lo spirito vitale del paese è straziato, ridotto all'ultimo respiro

Obsessions, of course, can never be shared.

Volare non è mai pericoloso, Michael Davvero? Davvero. E' schiantarsi che è pericoloso

Quello che in letteratura la gente chiama ironia, di solito nella vita vera si chiama dolore, incomprensione e disgrazia [...].

Don't you know what a pussy is, sir?' 'Of course he doesn't. He hasn't even seen Basic Instinct.

If ever I'm disheartened by failures such as these, I simply reflect on my humble beginnings and marvel at the enormous distance I have travelled since then.

Where are the laughs in massacre, famine and climate change, exactly? What's so funny about the Middle East, North Korea and Afghanistan? Who's going to chuckle when they pick up the London Review of Books and find John Lanchester arguing, convincingly as always, that the banking habits of the British people pose a greater threat to their own security than terrorism?

You shouldn't take notice of anything that Henry tells you, you know,' he now says, with a chilly smile. 'After all, he is a politician.

Sometimes there can be more to life than making a profit, Dorothy.

This book is full of passion. Full of anger, anyway. If it communicates anything at all, it's how much I hate these people, how evil they are, how much they've spoiled everything, with their vested interests and their influence and their privilege and their stranglehold on all the centres of power; how they've got us all cornered, how they've pretty well carved up the whole bloody country between them.

This is the crazed, manic energy of the bull at the end of the fight, fatally wounded but ploughing ahead, driven only by pain and anger and the mindless will to go on living.

Conoce esa sensación? Seguro que sí: tropezarse con un artista cuyo trabajo te habla tan directamente que es como si los dos compartieran el mismo lenguaje cómplice, y eso a la vez te reafirmara en lo que siempre has pensado y te dijera algo completamente nuevo. (...) ¿No la ha sentido, entonces?

Mr Gardner remarked at this point that he would have thought twice about accepting this job if he had known that he was joining a sinking ship, and asked whose idea it had been to employ this bloody woman in the first place.

Hilary's reputation had preceded her, and she found that on her first day she did not receive much of a welcome from her new colleagues. Well, she thought: fuck them. She was only going to be coming in one or two days a week. If that.

Nobody gives a tinker's fuck about fiction any more, not real fiction, and the only kind of … values anybody seems to care about are the ones that can be added up on a balance sheet.

You're hiding from the world because it frightens you. I frighten you.

Take that bike ride I went on the other week. Agony, it was. Complete bloody agony. But at least I met some people, went for a drink afterwards, got a couple of dinner invitations out of it. It may not sound like very much, but after a while you realize … there's nothing worse than being on your own. Nothing.