Time & Perspective Quote by Jonathan Coe

Coe’s confession is a craft note disguised as a personality quirk: he can’t stop the sprawl. The line lands because it frames excess not as indulgence but as inevitability, a kind of narrative metabolism. “Keeping things out” is a surprisingly physical phrase, suggesting that material - scenes, backstories, side characters, political atmospheres - presses against the boundaries of a form until it breaks them. Short stories demand omission with confidence; Coe admits his imagination works in the opposite direction, accumulating meaning through layers.

The subtext is also a quiet jab at how we romanticize brevity. Literary culture treats the short story as a purified distillation, a discipline. Coe flips that hierarchy. For him, compression isn’t nobler; it’s unnatural. That matters coming from a novelist whose work often braids private lives into national weather, especially in contemporary Britain, where politics and class seep into domestic spaces whether you invite them or not. His problem “keeping things out” reads like an aesthetic principle: the world is too interconnected to be neatly portioned.

It’s also an origin story for the kind of books Coe writes. Novels, at their best, are engineered digressions: they metabolize detours into architecture. The joke - short stories “turn into novels” - is self-deprecating, but it’s really a declaration of allegiance to the baggy form, where the mess isn’t a failure of control but the point.