J. M. Coetzee Quotes

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  • Novelist
  • born 1940
  • 135 quotes

J. M. Coetzee, a novelist (born 1940), is quoted 135 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are World, Ideas, Cruel and Barbarians.

Quotes with a ready-made image come first, then the rest in order of how often they are read and shared. Open any quote to copy it, share it, or turn it into a picture quote.

Unbelief is a belief.

I am not the we of anyone

We are not by nature cruel.

The barbarians come out at night.

When all else fails, philosophize.

Reason is simply a vast tautology.

There seemed nothing to do but live.

[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.

Long visits don't make for good friends.

Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths

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

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.

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

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

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 is quoted on

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