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"Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals."
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"The only way to change the world is to quit thinking it's a job for Superman. Real power lies in your own hands."

"If the tranquillity is killing you, seek for the storm to save your life!"

"The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide."

"Like birds leaving the dangerous places man must also leave his dangerous ideas!"

"The fate of every unusual thing is to be a usual thing quickly!"
Explore more quotes by J. M. Coetzee

"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."

"In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life."

"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."

"The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role."

"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."

"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."

"Elizabeth, Lady C, claims to be writing at the limits of language. Would it not be insulting to her if I were diligently to follow after her, explaining what she means but is not smart enough to say?"

"As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I dont wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere."

"The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint."

"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."
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