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If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
J. M. Coetzee
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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
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Novelist
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Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Says
Saying
Better
Way
Clearer
Shorter
Scrap
Fiction
More quotes by J. M. Coetzee
If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.
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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.
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he knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.
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His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough(72).
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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.
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I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
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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).
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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.
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I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
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Pain is truth all else is subject to doubt.
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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.
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[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.
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The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.
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All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
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And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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