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

More quotes by J. M. Coetzee

Image
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
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 gods, the immortals, were the inventors of death and corruption yet with one or two notable exceptions they have lacked the courage to try their invention out on themselves.
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
When all else fails, philosophize.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'
J. M. Coetzee
Image
[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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
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
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
Image
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
Image
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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