J. M. Coetzee quotes - page 3

J. M. Coetzee is a South African novelist, essayist, and literary critic, recognized for his deeply philosophical and often challenging works. His writing explores themes of identity, morality, and the legacy of colonialism. He has been awarded numerous honors, including the Nobel Prize in Literature. Here are 80 of his quotes:

At the Everyman Cinema there is a season of Satyajit Ray. He watches the Apu trilogy on successive nights in a state of rapt absorption. In Apu's bitter, trapped mother, his engaging, feckless father he recognizes, with a pang of guilt, his own parents. But it is the music above all that grips him, dizzyingly complex interplays between drums and stringed instruments, long arias on the flute whose scale or mode - he does not know enough about music theory to be sure which - catches at his heart, sending him into a mood of sensual melancholy that last long after the film has ended.

J. M. Coetzee

She no longer believes very strongly in belief... 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. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed in order to get the job done.

J. M. Coetzee

Why does love, even such love as he claims to practise, need the spectacle of beauty to bring it to life? What, in the abstract, do shapely legs have to do with love, or for that matter with desire? Or is that just the nature of nature, about which one does not ask questions?

J. M. Coetzee

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.

J. M. Coetzee

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

J. M. Coetzee

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.

J. M. Coetzee

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

J. M. Coetzee

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.

J. M. Coetzee

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

J. M. Coetzee

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.

J. M. Coetzee

In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.

J. M. Coetzee

We are not by nature cruel.

J. M. Coetzee

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

J. M. Coetzee

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.

J. M. Coetzee

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

J. M. Coetzee

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

J. M. Coetzee

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.

J. M. Coetzee

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

J. M. Coetzee

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

J. M. Coetzee

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.

J. M. Coetzee

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.

J. M. Coetzee

To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.

J. M. Coetzee