Quote

For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.

J. M. Coetzee

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
Critic
Essayist
Librettist
Linguist
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Ideas
Disgrace
Men
Convenient
World
Beat
Shape
Beats
Shapes
Shovels
Idea
Processing
Use
Corpses

More quotes by J. M. Coetzee

Image
I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'
J. M. Coetzee
Image
His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough(72).
J. M. Coetzee
Image
To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
J. M. Coetzee
Image
he knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
Unbelief is a belief.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
Long visits don't make for good friends.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
J. M. Coetzee
Image
If you were blind you would hardly have fallen in love in the first place. But now, do you truly wish to see the beloved in the cold clarity of the visual apparatus? It may be in your better interest to throw a veil over the gaze, so as to keep her alive in her archetypal, goddesslike form.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
Pain is truth all else is subject to doubt.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
Censorship is not an occupation that attracts intelligent, subtle minds. Censors can and often have been outwitted. But the game of slipping Aesopian messages past the censor is ultimately a sterile one, diverting writers from their proper task.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded.
J. M. Coetzee