Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Art
Original
Might
Profession
Firsts
Intention
First
Rule
Frowned
Right
Except
Skilled
Even
Follow
Restoration
Trying
Call
Improve
Never
Artist
Originals

More quotes by J. M. Coetzee

Image
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
Image
Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
Long visits don't make for good friends.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
Being a father ... I can't help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
The barbarians come out at night.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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
Image
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms.
J. M. Coetzee