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.

J. M. Coetzee

• Power
• Action
• Moral
• Deception

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Quotes to Explore

• 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.

  

  Daisy Fuentes
  • Attention
  • Study
  • Waiting

• 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.

  

  Haley Bennett
  • Long
  • Reality
  • Road

• 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.

  

  Gary Burton
  • Great
  • Emotional
  • Jazz

• 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.

  

  Samantha Shannon
  • Work
  • Music
  • Girl

• 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.

  

  Ian MacKaye
  • Time
  • World
  • Work

• 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.

  

  Damon Galgut
  • Up
  • Work
  • Know

• I think theatre at its best looks into the dark corners; clearly, my dark corners are full of doom.

  

  Laura Wade
  • Best
  • Dark
  • Theatre

• 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.

  

  Victoria Pendleton
  • Love
  • Beautiful
  • Water

• Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

  

  V. S. Pritchett
  • Time
  • Period
  • Youth

• 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.

  

  Cara Delevingne
  • Up
  • Live
  • Family

• 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.

  

  Rand Paul
  • Family
  • Doing
  • Percent

• Companies that have strong graphic identities have built them through years of use.

  

  Tahl Raz
  • Strong
  • Years
  • Through

• Every day is a new experience and I take it as it comes.

  

  Zac Efron
  • Experience
  • Day
  • New

• True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

  

  Baruch Spinoza
  • Life
  • True
  • Direction

• My dad has a huge vinyl collection downstairs, but I was never too interested. The only CD I had was by Adam Sandler.

  

  Patrick Fugit
  • Dad
  • Never
  • Vinyl

• 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.

  

  Gael Garcia Bernal
  • School
  • Job
  • Parents

• We asked our friends and relations to lend us their children, and, because we lived in London, children loved to come and stay for their half-term holidays.

  

  Maeve Binchy
  • Children
  • Friends
  • Holidays

• President Trump's seeming renunciation of an anti-interventionist foreign policy is the great surprise of the first 100 days, and the most ominous. For any new war could vitiate the Trump mandate and consume his presidency.

  

  Pat Buchanan
  • Great
  • War
  • Trump

• A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.

  

  T. S. Eliot
  • Good
  • Great
  • Understanding

• The audience swelled to six in the end and we all huddled in a corner.

  

  P. J. Kavanagh

• Richard Gavin is one of the bright new stars in contemporary weird fiction. His richly textured style, deft character portrayal, and powerful horrific conceptions make every one of his tales a pleasure to read.

  

  S. T. Joshi
  • Character
  • Style
  • Powerful

• The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.

  

  Robert Frost
  • People
  • Good
  • Work

• In quiet moments, I love to read.

  

  Lauren Tarshis
  • Moments

• 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.

  

  J. M. Coetzee
  • Power
  • Action
  • Moral