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Unbelief is a belief.
J. M. Coetzee
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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
Critic
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University Teacher
Writer
Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Unbelief
Belief
More quotes by J. M. Coetzee
Long visits don't make for good friends.
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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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Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
J. M. Coetzee
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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I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
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
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.
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
I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
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
The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
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.
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When all else fails, philosophize.
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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
When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring.
J. M. Coetzee
Perhaps but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
J. M. Coetzee
I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded.
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
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
If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.
J. M. Coetzee
