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There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on.

J. M. Coetzee

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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
Critic
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Librettist
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Novelist
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Prosaist
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University Teacher
Writer
Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Together
Nowhere
Firsts
Bridges
First
Push
Bridging
Every
Opening
Namely
People
Solve
Knocking
Problems
Solved
Simple
Bridge
Problem
Bank

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In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.
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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.
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And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant
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It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from 'the wise man's mouth' but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.
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he knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.
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Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.
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Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.
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Being a father ... I can't help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business.
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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.
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Despair ... is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.
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The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
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There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.
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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.
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All over the world, as governments retreat from their traditional duty to foster the common good and reconceive of themselves as mere managers of national economies, universities have been coming under pressure to turn themselves into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.
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The gods, the immortals, were the inventors of death and corruption yet with one or two notable exceptions they have lacked the courage to try their invention out on themselves.
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I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
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All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
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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.
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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.
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Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
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