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The barbarians come out at night.
J. M. Coetzee
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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
Critic
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University Teacher
Writer
Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Come
Barbarians
Night
More quotes by J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
J. M. Coetzee
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
J. M. Coetzee
Perhaps but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
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From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.
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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.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring.
J. M. Coetzee
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
In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.
J. M. Coetzee
If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
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All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.
J. M. Coetzee
[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
J. M. Coetzee
