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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.

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
Like
Cease
Nourishment
Breathe
Touches
Despair
Disgrace
Moment
Limbs
Moments
Gas
Care
Steel
Without
Throat
Even
Relax
Tasteless

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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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The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
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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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When all else fails, philosophize.
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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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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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Long visits don't make for good friends.
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he knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.
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Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
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Perhaps but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
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Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who submits to no such moral test. To hold on to power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary.
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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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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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Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
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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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Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.
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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 want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.
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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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I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
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