Coetzee Quotes

• Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.

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  Padgett Powell

  Book   Juice   Notable  

  4910

• I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully.

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  Teju Cole

  Grateful   Book   Speech  

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  1837

• There are writers I return to no matter what I'm working on, writers like the South African J.M. Coetzee. He has an ability to make you feel that he is writing for you alone.

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  Laila Lalami

  Writing   Matter   Return  

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

  1716

• Out of all the fighters that I have developed, clothed, financed, Gerrie Coetzee is the only one who had the decency to say 'thanks'.

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  Don King

  Boxing   Thanks   Fighter  

  4845

• I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.

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  Lynne Tillman

  Jobs   Character   Winning  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  3948

• Disgrace is a subtle, multi-layered story, as much concerned with politics as it is with the itch of male flesh. Coetzee's prose is chaste and lyrical without being self- conscious: it is a relief to encounter writing as quietly stylish as this. I was not totally convinced by Lurie's musical abilities, with regard to his proposed opera, but that is my sole complaint.

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  Paul Bailey

  Writing   Self   Musical Ability  

  3202

• Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you have read Thomas Mann in any case. Learn by copying, sentence by sentence some of the masters. Copy Coetzee's or Sebald's sentences and see what happens to your story. Consider creative non-fiction if you want to stay in South Africa. It might be the way to go. Never neglect back and hamstring exercises, otherwise you won't be able to write your novel. One needs one's buttocks to think.

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  Marlene van Niekerk

  Writing   Exercise   Thinking  

  4204

• I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

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  Amy Waldman

  Powerful   Coffee   Writing  

  1594