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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
Essayist
Librettist
Linguist
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Novel
Novelist
Wrong
Emerge
Away
Novelists
Great
Passings
Even
Likely
Passing
Bemoan
Prove
Denmark
Perhaps
Switzerland

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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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The barbarians come out at night.
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[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.
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Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
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The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.
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I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
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Long visits don't make for good friends.
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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.
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When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring.
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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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The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
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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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He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.
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There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on.
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I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
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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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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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The gods, the immortals, were the inventors of death and corruption yet with one or two notable exceptions they have lacked the courage to try their invention out on themselves.
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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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When all else fails, philosophize.
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