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It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet.

J. M. Coetzee

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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
Critic
Essayist
Librettist
Linguist
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Getting
Shaw
Used
Ceases
Hard
Surprised
Things
Cease
Time
Harder
Gets
Easier
Grows

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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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Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.
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The barbarians come out at night.
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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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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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Perhaps but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
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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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There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on.
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Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him.
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The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.
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Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who submits to no such moral test. To hold on to power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary.
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For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.
J. M. Coetzee
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Pain is truth all else is subject to doubt.
J. M. Coetzee
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To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.
J. M. Coetzee
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It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from 'the wise man's mouth' but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.
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He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.
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I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
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Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
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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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I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.
J. M. Coetzee