Quotes from Jonathan Coe

We say, 'Shall we meet for a drink?', as though drinking were the main end of the appointment, and the matter of company only incidental, we are so shy about admitting our need for one another. [...] We say, 'Would you like to come for some coffee?', as though it were less frightening to acknowledge that we are heavily dependent on mildly stimulating drinks, than to acknowledge that we are at all dependent on the companionship of other people.

quando perdi qualcuno e questo qualcuno ti manca, tu soffri perché la persona assente si è trasformata in un essere immaginario: irreale. Ma il tuo desiderio di lei non è immaginario. Così è a quello che devi aggrapparti: al desiderio. Perché è reale.

The upshot was that she lost her religion - with a vengeance - and walked out on him, taking these three daughters with her. Faith, Hope and Brenda.

Am I the same person that I dream about?

Me gusta la lluvia antes de caer. Ya sé que no existe. Por eso es mi favorita. Porque no hace falta que algo sea de verdad para hacerte feliz, ¿no?.

You didn't take part, Benjamin?" Gunther asked, as he passed me a plate of cheese and cold meat. "My brother doesn't play games," said Paul. "He's an aesthete. He sat by the window all afternoon with a funny look on his face: probably composing a tone poem.

life only starts to make sense when you realize that sometimes - often - all the time - two completely contradictory ideas can be true. Everything that led up to you was wrong. Therefore, you should not have been born. But everything about you is right: you had to be born. You were inevitable.

Yes, she would have been partial to men, perhaps she might even have confined herself to one man in particular, if only she had been able to find one who shared her view that intimacy between two people was of value irrespective of whether it led to sticky conflux.

My daughter was right: young people do not notice the feelings of their parents, are not even aware that they have feelings, most of the time. They live in a blissful state of sociopathy, as far as their parents' emotions are concerned

In circumstances this desperate there is only one thing that can console me. I always keep at least three different kinds of Brie in the kitchen for emergency situations.

he was the proud owner of a quite colossal member, which on the many awestruck occasions it had been exposed to public view had been compared variously to a giant frankfurter, an overfed python, a length of led piping, the trunk of a rogue elephant, a barrage balloon, an airport-sized Toblerone and a roll of wet wallpaper.

As you get older, the hopes get smaller and the regrets get bigger. The challenge is to fight it. To stop the regrets from taking over

I had no sense of any reputation that What a Carve Up! might acquire - at the time I didnt even have a publisher, so my main worry was whether it was even going to see the light of day or not.

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.

But you can try to read books at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons.

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.

Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are.

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 I have always - ever since The Accidental Woman - written novels about individuals attempting to make choices in the context of situations over which they have no control.

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.

The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.

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.

You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.

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