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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

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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 85
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
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University Teacher
Writer
Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
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Mother
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Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.
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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.
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Perhaps but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
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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.
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Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
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We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
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Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.
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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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That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.
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I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
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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.
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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.
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If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
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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.
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The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
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The barbarians come out at night.
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Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
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As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calendar. Like May 1 or July 14 or December 25, September 11 may seem full of significance to some people, while to other people it is just another day.
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Long visits don't make for good friends.
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And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant
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