Words matter. These are the best J. M. Coetzee Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
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.
All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.
I read a great deal as a child. A lot of children go through a phase of reading in a literally voracious way. It is their primary imaginative activity. Maybe that’s an experience which is not so common any more with the presence of television in every home.
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.
That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.
In becoming a citizen, one undertakes certain duties and responsibilities. One of the more intangible of those duties and responsibilities is no matter what one’s birth and background, to accept the historical past of the new country as one’s own.
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.
I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calendar. Like May 1 or July 14 or December 25, September 11 may seem full of significance to some people, while to other people it is just another day.
Everyone seems to see bleakness and despair in my books. I don’t read them that way. I see myself as writing comic books, books about ordinary people trying to live ordinary, dull, happy lives while the world is falling to pieces around them.
If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
Elizabeth, Lady C, claims to be writing at the limits of language. Would it not be insulting to her if I were diligently to follow after her, explaining what she means but is not smart enough to say?
In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.
The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself.
If it is indeed impossible – or at least very difficult – to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.
We are not by nature cruel.
There is nothing more inimical to writing than the spirit of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism abhors the play of signs, the endlessness of writing. Fundamentalism means nothing more or less than going back to an origin and staying there. It stands for one founding book and, thereafter, no more books.
Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.
The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.
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.
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.
