J. M. Coetzee quotes - page 3

The boy is special, Aunt Annie told his mother, and his mother in turn told him. But what kind of special? No one ever says. (J. M. Coetzee)
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. View quote
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. View quote
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? View quote
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. View quote
J. M. Coetzee
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization. View quote
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. View quote
J. M. Coetzee
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation. View quote
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. View quote
J. M. Coetzee
Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals. View quote
J. M. Coetzee
Lebanon, Israel, Ireland, South Africa - wherever there is a bleeding sore on the body of the world, the same hard-eyed narrow-minded fanatics are busy, indifferent to life, in love with death. (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. View quote
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. View quote
J. M. Coetzee
We are not by nature cruel. View quote
J. M. Coetzee
I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African. View quote
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. View quote
J. M. Coetzee
The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness. View quote
J. M. Coetzee
In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other. View quote
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. View quote
J. M. Coetzee
The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role. View quote
J. M. Coetzee
My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms. (J. M. Coetzee)
If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction? View quote
J. M. Coetzee
I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
J. M. Coetzee