Writers Write Is All About Writing
Writers Write Is All About Writing
Jonathan Coe

Literary Birthday – 19 August – Jonathan Coe

Happy Birthday, Jonathan Coe, born on 19 August 1961.

Jonathan Coe Quotes

  1. It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.
  2. Some people don’t realise that a straight ‘No’ can be the kindest answer in the world.
  3. Words are tricky little bastards, and very rarely say what you want them to say.
  4. I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don’t write short stories because they turn into novels.
  5. There’s a fine line between forgetting an event, and suppressing the memory of it.
  6. As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you’re into politics, aren’t you?
  7. Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are.
  8. You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.
  9. I’m one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.

Jonathan Coe is an award-winning English novelist and writer. His first surviving story, a detective thriller called The Castle of Mystery, was written at the age of eight. The first few pages of this story appear in his novel What a Carve Up!. It became his first international success, with translations in sixteen languages. One of Coe’s claims to fame is that he holds the record for writing the longest sentence in the literature of the English language. It is in The Rotters’ Club and is 13,955 words (ahead of James Joyce’s soliloquy by Molly Bloom in Ulysses). His preoccupation with political issues is often expressed comically in the form of satire. His work has received many prizes and awards, including both Costa Novel of the Year and Prix du Livre Européen for Middle England. In France he won the Prix Médicis for The House of Sleep and has been appointed Officier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres.

Source for photograph: Taken by Flickr user Walnut Whippet at the 2006 Humber Mouth Festival, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jonathan_Coe.jpg


by Amanda Patterson
Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: The Complete Author Birthday Calendar

Posted on: 19th August 2017
(4,016 views)