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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.

J. M. Coetzee

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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
Critic
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Novelist
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University Teacher
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Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Even
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Bemoan
Prove
Denmark
Perhaps
Switzerland
Novel
Novelist
Wrong
Emerge
Away
Novelists
Great
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More quotes by J. M. Coetzee

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I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
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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.
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[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.
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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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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.
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From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.
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The barbarians come out at night.
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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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Unbelief is a belief.
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I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
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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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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
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If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.
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When all else fails, philosophize.
J. M. Coetzee
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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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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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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.
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And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant
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Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
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