“The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.”
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Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.
J. M. Coetzee 
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That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.
J. M. Coetzee
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I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
J. M. Coetzee
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If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
J. M. Coetzee
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I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
J. M. Coetzee
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