At IBM he has to keep his fantasies of Monica Vitti to himself, and the rest of his arty pretensions too… — J. M. Coetzee
At IBM he has to keep his fantasies of Monica Vitti to himself, and the rest of his arty pretensions too. [...] For reasons that are not clear to him, he has been adopted as a chum by a fellow programmer named Bill Briggs. [...] Whereas the other programmers speak with unplaceable grammar-school accents and start the day by flipping to the financial pages of the Telegraph to check the share prices, Bill Briggs has a marked London accent and stores his money in a building society account.
p. 50Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
How can anyone in England understand what brings people from the far corners of the earth to die on a wet, miserable island which they detest and to which they have no ties? — Chapter 18, page 148.
He does not as yet know England well enough to do England in prose. He is not even sure he can do the parts of London he is familiar with, the London of crowds trudging to work, of cold and rain, of bedsitters with curtainless windows and forty-watt bulbs. — Chapter 7, page 63.
Once upon a time, when he was still an innocent child, he believed that cleverness was the only yardstick that mattered, that as long as he was clever enough he would attain everything he desired. Going to university put him in his place. The university showed him he was not the cleverest, not by a long chalk. — Chapter 8, page 65.
