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[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.
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
Outstanding
Writer
More quotes by J. M. Coetzee
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.
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
Long visits don't make for good friends.
J. M. Coetzee
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
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Censorship is not an occupation that attracts intelligent, subtle minds. Censors can and often have been outwitted. But the game of slipping Aesopian messages past the censor is ultimately a sterile one, diverting writers from their proper task.
J. M. Coetzee
Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.
J. M. Coetzee
In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.
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
From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.
J. M. Coetzee
When all else fails, philosophize.
J. M. Coetzee
If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.
J. M. Coetzee
Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
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
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.
J. M. Coetzee
The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
J. M. Coetzee
That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.
J. M. Coetzee
Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run.
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
I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
J. M. Coetzee
