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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
"We are all artists, painting the world with our thoughts while coloring the universe with our deeds."
"My pond life with hydra is over, now I'm into the ocean world of poetry to dive deeper.."
"I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it."
"What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other."
"One's writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it's all up; you may as well throw it away and begin afresh."
"Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other."
"You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover."
"But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it."
Explore more quotes by J. M. Coetzee
"I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African."
"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?"
"If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?"
"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."
"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."
"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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