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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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Exlpore more Creativity quotes
"You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story."
"What makes people tick? Life can be a trap of ennui, but imagery may be a redemptive escape from dullness. The iconic power and exuberance of images generate an inexorable addiction that needs to be gratified without respite. Here and now! ['Give me more images']"
"Authors always carry a means for scribbling and an excuse for pausing, often inopportunely, to record those fleeting sparks of creative fancy that might otherwise vanish like a wisp in the wind if ignored. Writing is a jealous and needy lover."
"Some people have a handful of ideas, but not enough time to realize them."
"I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh."
"Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion -writing- only the wrong side of the carpet."
"As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall."
"Genius in truth means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way."
"Our creativity is a universe within this universe, certainly a much bigger one!"
"My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything."
Explore more quotes by J. M. Coetzee
"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?"
"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."
"If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?"
"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."
"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."
"Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals."
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