J. M. Coetzee Quotes

Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mund...

The presentation scene itself we skip. It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, s...

What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one's bones and then o...

Besides, who is to say that the feelings he writes in his diary are his true feelings? Who is to say...

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

All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, no...

In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have...

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherw...

Die Wahrheit wird nicht im Zorn gesprochen. Die Wahrheit, wenn sie denn gesprochen wird, wird im Gei...

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

I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciat...

The body, I had been taught, wants only to live. Suicide, I had understood, is an act not of the bod...

Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in ...

You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.”“I’m going to e...

Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There mu...

The reason is that as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In anot...

He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and mo...

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

I don't know what you do about sex and I don't want to know, but this is not the way to go about it....

Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into th...

A risk to own anything : a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around. No...

He is not, he hopes, a sentimentalist. He tries not to sentimentalize the animals he kills, or to se...

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

In a minute, in an hour, it will be too late; whatever is happening to her will be set in stone, wil...

A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not...

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of...

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

In a sudden and soundless eruption, as if he has fallen into a waking dream, a stream of images pour...

Why has he taken this job?... For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead; and what do dogs know...

It’s that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have ...

How many of the ragged workingmen who pass him in the street are secret authors of works that will o...

No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. Not awareness, as far as we can make out,...

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

It always puzzled him, when he was a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so b...

It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in ...

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

In a world of chance is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselv...

Asymmetrie [macht] Menschen unglücklich.

Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he ...

What would yield the greater benefit to mankind: if I spent the afternoon taking stock in my dispens...

He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening wa...

You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms a...

As you speak I swear I can hear words being selected, one after another, from the word-box you carry...

Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it ...

I urge you: don't cut short these thought-trains of yours. Follow them through to their end. Your th...

Yet what happened in fact? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him wi...

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

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

Well, cast your mind back to the books he wrote. What is the one theme that keeps recurring from boo...

Why?' says the boy.'Why? Because staying alive is more important than anything else.''Why is staying...

I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a ...

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

I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philos...

There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who h...

I have lived through an eventful year, yet understand no more of it than a babe in arms. Of all the ...

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

Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, wit...

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

What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together w...

Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to...

Without desire how is it possible to make a story?

if Jesus had stooped to play politics he might have become a key man in Roman Judea, a big operator....

In a while the organism will repair itself, and I, the ghost within it, will be my old self again. B...

The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite differe...

Not only may you not enter the state without certification: you are, in the eyes of the state, not d...