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"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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"The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone."
"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other."
"There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness."
"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."
"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones."
"If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people."
Explore more quotes by J. M. Coetzee
"Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role."
"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?"
"I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African."
"The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness."
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