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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

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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Author
Critic
Essayist
Librettist
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Novelist
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University Teacher
Writer
Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
Loss
Stirred
Lament
Stirring
Gods
Likely

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
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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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I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'
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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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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.
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And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant
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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.
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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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Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
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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
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The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
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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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Pain is truth all else is subject to doubt.
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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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I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
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