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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
Essayist
Librettist
Linguist
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Unbelief
Belief

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I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
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Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
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If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.
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[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.
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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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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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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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Denunciations of the manipulativeness of advertisers can unfortunately all too easily be turned on their heads into denunciations of the gullibility of consumers. Both are forms of scapegoating, neither accomplishes anything.
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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.
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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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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.
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There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.
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Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
J. M. Coetzee
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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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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.
J. M. Coetzee
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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 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.
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I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'
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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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Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
J. M. Coetzee