J. M. Coetzee Quotes
Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who submits to no such moral test. To hold on to power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary.
Quotes to Explore
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You have got to pay attention, you have got to study and you have to do your homework. You have to score higher than everybody else. Otherwise, there is always somebody there waiting to take your place.
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I didn't have a long-term plan or goal. If there would have been a road map showing me the way to my dreams becoming reality, I might have given it a second thought.
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But if you listen to great piano players, both classical and jazz, there's a huge range of dynamics and colors and emotional expression that's possible with the instrument.
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I was mostly an indoor girl at university. Where other students did drama or music or sport alongside their degrees, I wrote. I used to work on essays and classwork during the day and 'The Bone Season' in the evenings.
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I'm very English. I'm white. I mean, I'm so pale. With spray tans they start peeling and start getting really dirty looking.
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Part of the way the work world works is not so much creating a separation between your work and your free time, but creating the illusion of a separation between your work and your free time. Every day is the weekend for me, which means I'm always busy.
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One of the questions writers bump up against in their work, whether they know it or not, is about lying. Because fiction is a form of deceit, and one's abilities are measured by how convincingly one can persuade readers that these events really happened.
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I think theatre at its best looks into the dark corners; clearly, my dark corners are full of doom.
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You look at a horse, and he's such a majestic, beautiful, powerful creature that you can't not be impressed. I love scraping the water off them when I wash them down because you go all round the contours, and its muscle and body, and you just think, 'Ooh, isn't this a magnificent creature.' You're touching it, and it's just solid, carved muscle.
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Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
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Fame, do I like it? No. It has bought a lot for me in my career, but there are a lot of downsides to it. You give up your privacy. I did it to myself but not to my family and friends. You don't ask for it. You just have to live with it.
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Many Americans who have suffered during a recession have had to cut their spending 1 percent, and they didn't like doing it, but they were able to do it to get their family's finances back in order.
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Companies that have strong graphic identities have built them through years of use.
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I have an unending desire to be better and make myself a better person, better mother.
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Every day is a new experience and I take it as it comes.
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True virtue is life under the direction of reason.
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My dad has a huge vinyl collection downstairs, but I was never too interested. The only CD I had was by Adam Sandler.
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I was little there were times I wanted my parents to be normal. I wanted them to have a religion. I wanted them to have a job, like the parents of every other kid I went to school with.
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Retirement's the most wonderful thing. I get to enjoy all the things I never stopped to notice on the way up. After an extraordinary life, it's time to enjoy my retirement.
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I think 'The Wire' is my all-time favorite TV show. It's so brilliant, the way it critiques society, and how it handles that everybody who gets power loses their moral code and stops going to the root of the problem and just tries to maintain their own power.
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Any neuroscience book is the death of me. I'm currently obsessed with 'The Moral Landscape' from Sam Harris. He's a controversial writer addressing science and religion while talking about the deep undertaking of your brain.
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America's best buy is a telephone call to the right man.
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I would sit in my dorm room and write songs. I loved it. I was learning to sing and play guitar. I was becoming a musician. I was the beginner who somehow could write a song.
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Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who submits to no such moral test. To hold on to power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary.
