J. M. Coetzee Quotes

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

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.

Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.

When all else fails, philosophize.

Anyone who says that life matters less to an animal than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve. When you say that the fight lacks a dimension of intellectual or imaginative horror, I agree. It is not the mode of being animals to have an intellectual horror: their whole being is in the living flesh...I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner.

Children all over the world consort quite naturally with animals. They don't see any dividing line. That is something they have to be taught, just as they have to be taught it is all right to kill and eat them.

Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.

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

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

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?

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

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

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.

The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.

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

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

In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.

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.

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

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

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.

I am not the we of anyone

The highest type of intelligence, says Aristotle, manifests itself in an ability to see connections where no one has seen them before, that is, to think analogically.

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

One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.

Reason is simply a vast tautology.

Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him.

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

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

They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends? Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?...all this discussion of consciousness and whether animals have it is just a smokescreen. At bottom we protect our own kind. Thumbs up to human babies, thumbs down to veal calves.

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

Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write this book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom...Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce's imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.

There is nothing more humanly beautiful than a woman's breasts. Nothing more humanly beautiful, nothing more humanly mysterious than why men should want to caress, over and over again, with paintbrush or chisel or hand, these oddly curved fatty sacs, and nothing more humanly endearing than our complicity (I mean the complicity of women) in their obsession.

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.

It’s admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.

Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.

The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.

I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going.

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

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.

Unbelief is a belief.

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

There seemed nothing to do but live.

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.

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

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

Long visits don't make for good friends.

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.

As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies,as a form of abstract thought. I dont wish to deny the uses of the intellect,but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.

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