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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
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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
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Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Idea
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Belief
More quotes by J. M. Coetzee
Long visits don't make for good friends.
J. M. Coetzee
I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
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
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
I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
J. M. Coetzee
[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.
J. M. Coetzee
So it has come, the day of testing. Without warning, without fanfare, it is here, and he is in the middle of it. In his chest his heart hammers so hard that it too, in its dumb way, must know. How will they stand up to the testing, he and his heart?
J. M. Coetzee
If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.
J. M. Coetzee
The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
J. M. Coetzee
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
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
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
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
Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who submits to no such moral test. To hold on to power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary.
J. M. Coetzee
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
Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.
J. M. Coetzee
I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going.
J. M. Coetzee
When all else fails, philosophize.
J. M. Coetzee
All over the world, as governments retreat from their traditional duty to foster the common good and reconceive of themselves as mere managers of national economies, universities have been coming under pressure to turn themselves into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.
J. M. Coetzee
All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
J. M. Coetzee
