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Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wrong.

J. M. Coetzee

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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 85
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
Prove
Denmark
Perhaps
Switzerland
Novel
Novelist
Wrong
Emerge
Away
Novelists
Great
Passings
Even
Likely
Passing
Bemoan

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Perhaps we invented the gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with unclean things. It's not our fault, it's theirs. We're just their children.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Unbelief is a belief.
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Denunciations of the manipulativeness of advertisers can unfortunately all too easily be turned on their heads into denunciations of the gullibility of consumers. Both are forms of scapegoating, neither accomplishes anything.
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I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
J. M. Coetzee
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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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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.
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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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No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.' (Said to Paul by Elizabeth Costello, the interloping novelist-angel-inner voice).
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The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
J. M. Coetzee
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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).
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Perhaps but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
J. M. Coetzee
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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.
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I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
J. M. Coetzee
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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.
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The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
J. M. Coetzee
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Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
J. M. Coetzee