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No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.' (Said to Paul by Elizabeth Costello, the interloping novelist-angel-inner voice).

J. M. Coetzee

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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 85
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
Critic
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Novelist
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University Teacher
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Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Lying
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Paul
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Costello
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Elizabeth
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It’s admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.
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he knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.
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And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant
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Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.
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If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
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The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
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Perhaps we invented the gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with unclean things. It's not our fault, it's theirs. We're just their children.
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Censorship is not an occupation that attracts intelligent, subtle minds. Censors can and often have been outwitted. But the game of slipping Aesopian messages past the censor is ultimately a sterile one, diverting writers from their proper task.
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In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.
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Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.
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All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
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In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.
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From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.
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The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.
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The highest type of intelligence, says Aristotle, manifests itself in an ability to see connections where no one has seen them before, that is, to think analogically.
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The gods, the immortals, were the inventors of death and corruption yet with one or two notable exceptions they have lacked the courage to try their invention out on themselves.
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She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. 'So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change.
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When all else fails, philosophize.
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Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.
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I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'
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