J.M. Coetzee Quotes

One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.

Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.

And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant

The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.

Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wrong.

I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'

No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.' (Said to Paul by Elizabeth Costello, the interloping novelist-angel-inner voice).

In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.

[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.

I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.

he knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.

The gods, the immortals, were the inventors of death and corruption; yet with one or two notable exceptions they have lacked the courage to try their invention out on themselves.

She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. 'So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change.

Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.

Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn't change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it.

When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring.

Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.

Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths

We are not by nature cruel.

Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.

Die Wahrheit wird nicht im Zorn gesprochen. Die Wahrheit, wenn sie denn gesprochen wird, wird im Geist der Liebe gesprochen.

Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence.

I urge you: don't cut short these thought-trains of yours. Follow them through to their end. Your thoughts and your feelings. Follow them through and you will grow with them.

You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms are knotted behind my head, I walk bowed under the weight of you.

Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.

A good person. Not a bad resolution to make, in dark times.

I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am.

You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.”“I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.

Asymmetrie [macht] Menschen unglücklich.

The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.

To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.

He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.

Is that the secret meaning of the word story, do you think: a storing place of memories?

In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story.

I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciate and enjoy many geographies, but there is only one that one feels in one’s bones.

What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?

There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason.

Without desire how is it possible to make a story?

It always puzzled him, when he was a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so bad at telling bedtime stories.

What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one's bones and then one day without warning flood out.

Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity.

Moer and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth in South Africa.