JM Coetzee Quotes

(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

When all else fails, philosophize.

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?

All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.

I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.

Because a women'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.

Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.

Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.

Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run.

I am not the we of anyone

From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.

The highest type of intelligence, says Aristotle, manifests itself in an ability to see connections where no one has seen them before, that is, to think analogically.

Reason is simply a vast tautology.

I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world.

The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.

Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.

Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

Long visits don't make for good friends.

Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.

I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going.

The spark of true poetry flashes when ideas are juxtaposed that no one has yet thought of bringing together.

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

Unbelief is a belief.

The barbarians come out at night.

There seemed nothing to do but live.

It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet.

I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.

The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.

I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.

If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.

Despair ... is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.

For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.

The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself.

I said last week that the number on Jean's back does not matter. He stays effective as a runner, decision-maker and leader.

Being a father ... I can't help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business.

Temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict.

Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined.

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.

It is a world of words that creates a world of things.

The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.

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.