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"I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction."
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Exlpore more Fiction quotes
"A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning."
"Whoever knows that the mind is a fiction and devoid of anything real knows that his own mind neither exists nor doesn't exist."
"Uh...are we going to talk about what just happened?" Victoria asked as Drake stepped over to Finn's desk to look at the map layout of the cemetery, seemingly calm about the fact that Bo and Nyx had just disappeared into thin air."
"Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by."
"If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore."
"In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible."
"Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic."
Explore more quotes by J. M. Coetzee
"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?"
"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."
"Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals."
"I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world."
"I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African."
"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."
"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."
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