Quotes from J. M. Coetzee

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

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

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.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

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

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.

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

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?

Islamic fundamentalism in its activist manifestation is bad news. Religious fundamentalism in general is bad news. We know about religious fundamentalism in South Africa. Calvinist fundamentalism has been an unmitigated force of benightedness in our history.

The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty.

Perhaps it does us good to have a fall every now and then. As long as we don't break.

What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one's bones and then one day without warning flood out.

Schmerz ist Wahrheit; alles andere wird angezweifelt.

según mi experiencia la poesía te habla y te llega a primera vista o no te llegará nunca. Hay un destello de revelación y un destello reflejo de respuesta. Es como el rayo. Como enamorarse.

being seduced is a pleasure in itself. One yields for the sake of yielding.

How do you eradicate contempt, especially when that contempt is founded on nothing more substantial than differences in table manners, variations in the structure of the eyelid?

Je mehr sich die Dinge ändern, desto mehr bleibt alles beim alten.

Die Wahrheit wird nicht im Zorn gesprochen. Die Wahrheit, wenn sie denn gesprochen wird, wird im Geist der Liebe gesprochen.

I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire. Is he blind?

What is there left for me after my purgatory of solitude?...I welcome death as a version of life in which I will not be myself. There is a fallacy here which I ought to see but will not. For when I wake on the ocean floor it will be the same old voice that drones out of me...

We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself!

I behave in some ways like a lover - I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her - but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.

All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I own proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world.