Quotes by Jonathan Coe

“But we are entitled to look for continuity in politics.”

“So it was primarily a desire to write about that period in ones life rather than that period in history or in British culture or whatever.”

“The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnsons.”

“My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America theyve been far and away my most successful books, but I never saw a cent from any of it.”

“As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wifes money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.”

“As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, youre into politics, arent you?”

“I was mainly in a state of nervousness while I wrote it - nervousness that it was far bigger and more complicated than anything Id attempted before, and that maybe my talent just wasnt up to it and the book would have to be abandoned, or would turn out not to work at all when it was finished.”

“I became quite taken over by Johnsons 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.”

“But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I dont write short stories because they turn into novels.”

“Im one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.”

Hey - Duggie! Duggie! Duggie! He came running up to me, sparkler in hand. I felt like sticking one on him, the cheeky bastard. Nobody called me Duggie.He held the sparkler up in front of my face and said, Wait. Wait.I was already waiting. What else was there to do?Here you are, he said. Look! Whats this?At that precise moment, his sparkler fizzled out. I didnt say anything, so he supplied the answer himself. The death of the socialist dream, he said.He giggled like a little maniac, and stared at me for a second or two before running off, and in that time I saw exactly the same thing Id seen in Stubbss eyes the day before. The same triumphalism, the same excitement, not because something new was being created, but because something was being destroyed. I thought about Phillip and his stupid rock symphony and I swear that my eyes pricked with tears. This ludicrous attempt to squeeze the history of the countless millennia into half an hours worth of crappy riffs and chord changes suddenly seemed no more Quixotic than all the things my dad and his colleagues had been working towards for so long. A national health service, free to everyone who needed it. Redistribution of wealth through taxation. Equality of opportunity. Beautiful ideas, Dad, noble aspirations, just as there was the kernel of something beautiful in Philips musical hodge-podge. But it was never going to happen. If there had ever been a time when it might have happened, that time was slipping away. The moment had passed. Goodbye to all that.Easy to be clever with hindsight, I know, but I was right, wasnt I? Look back on that night from the perspective of now, the closing weeks of the closing century of our second millennium - if the calendar of some esoteric and fast-disappearing religious sect counts for anything any more - and you have to admit that I was right. And so was Benjamins brother, the little bastard, with his sparkler and his horrible grin and that nasty gleam of incipient victory in his twelve-year-old eyes. Goodbye to all that, he was saying. Hed worked it out already. He knew what the future held in store.

Take It and Like It

Your gravity, your grace have turned a tideIn me, no lunar power can reverse;But in your narcoleptic eyes I spiedA sightlessness tonight: or something worse,A disregard that made me feel unmanned.Meanwhile, insomniac, I catch my breathTo think I saw my future traced in sandOne afternoon as still, as carved, as death,”And pray for an oblivion so deepIt ends in transformation. Only dawnCan save me, flood this haunted house of sleepWith light, and drown the thoughts that nightly warn:Another lifetime is the least you’ll need, to traceThe guarded secrets of her gravity, her grace.

“There was the outside world, the world of politics and history, and there was my inside world, the world of music and family, and the two worlds never met. In the outside world there was economic stagnation and military rule and political censorship and people being tortured and sent away to concentration camps; in my inside world there was music and laughter, there were home comforts and good food and the warm glow of the unconditional love my parents felt for each other and for me. I lived in a little bubble of happiness and paid hardly any attention to what was going on around me.”