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Long visits don't make for good friends.
J. M. Coetzee
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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 85
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
Critic
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University Teacher
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Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Good
Visits
Friends
Long
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More quotes by 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.
J. M. Coetzee
The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
J. M. Coetzee
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
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
If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
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
From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.
J. M. Coetzee
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).
J. M. Coetzee
When all else fails, philosophize.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
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
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
I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'
J. M. Coetzee
His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.
J. M. Coetzee
Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
J. M. Coetzee
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).
J. M. Coetzee
I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
J. M. Coetzee
To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.
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
We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
J. M. Coetzee
