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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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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
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Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
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More quotes by J. M. Coetzee
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
And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant
J. M. Coetzee
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
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
There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.
J. M. Coetzee
The barbarians come out at night.
J. M. Coetzee
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
Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
J. M. Coetzee
If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.
J. M. Coetzee
I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.
J. M. Coetzee
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
Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
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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.
J. M. Coetzee
I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
J. M. Coetzee
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
he knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.
J. M. Coetzee
When all else fails, philosophize.
J. M. Coetzee
I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Long visits don't make for good friends.
J. M. Coetzee
