Jonathan Coe Quotes

Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn't intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

I cannot write a novel because I cannot work in continuity. My works are more abstract, may be, I will try short story writing.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

I'm not one of these 'the characters write themselves; the story just fell out of me' kind of writers. Wish it was like that.

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

I started writing novels by not thinking about actually writing a whole novel - that felt altogether too daunting. I thought out a rough idea, then wrote chapter by chapter, and then by the time I'd hit 40,000 words, it was a challenge just to see if I could get to the end.

I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story.

I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.

I consider myself a writer. I don't favour any type of writing. I sometimes wish short stories came more easily to me.

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

When I really have to push and grope and scratch and claw to make a story work, that's a telltale sign that maybe something conceptually isn't right.

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.

I don't think I'm a natural novelist. Plot is definitely one of my weaker points. I've been working on it a long time, and it's not getting much better.

When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.

Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a lengthy novel and then discovering it's rubbish.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don't ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I'm writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.