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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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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
Critic
Essayist
Librettist
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Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
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University Teacher
Writer
Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
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Processing
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Corpses
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Men
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More quotes by J. M. Coetzee

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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 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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Unbelief is a belief.
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I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
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If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.
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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.
J. M. Coetzee
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To me, a philosopher who says that the distinction between human and nonhuman depends on whether you have a white or a black skin, and a philosopher who says that the distinction between human and nonhuman depends on whether or not you know the difference between a subject and a predicate, are more alike than they are unlike.
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And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant
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Pain is truth all else is subject to doubt.
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[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.
J. M. Coetzee
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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.
J. M. Coetzee
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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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The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
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Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
J. M. Coetzee
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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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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.
J. M. Coetzee
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Despair ... is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.
J. M. Coetzee
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Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn't change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it.
J. M. Coetzee
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I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
J. M. Coetzee
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In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.
J. M. Coetzee