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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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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
Critic
Essayist
Librettist
Linguist
Novelist
Poet
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Screenwriter
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University Teacher
Writer
Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Dies
Without
Think
Thinking
Escorted
Ready
More quotes by J. M. Coetzee
Unbelief is a belief.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
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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Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wrong.
J. M. Coetzee
[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.
J. M. Coetzee
Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
J. M. Coetzee
I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.
J. M. Coetzee
If you were blind you would hardly have fallen in love in the first place. But now, do you truly wish to see the beloved in the cold clarity of the visual apparatus? It may be in your better interest to throw a veil over the gaze, so as to keep her alive in her archetypal, goddesslike form.
J. M. Coetzee
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
And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run.
J. M. Coetzee
I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Artists no longer starve in garrets. Some people may think this is not wholly a good thing, that being an artist has become too comfortable, at least in the West. I'm not sure I agree. It's a mark of civilization to encourage the arts and the life of the mind.
J. M. Coetzee
Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.
J. M. Coetzee
