Quote

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.

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
Trying
Inventor
Exception
Corruption
Invention
Immortals
Gods
Inventors
Courage
Lacked
Death
Exceptions
Two
Notable

More quotes by J. M. Coetzee

Image
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
Image
[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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
Image
One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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
Image
Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
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
When all else fails, philosophize.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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
Image
Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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
Image
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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
Image
In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.
J. M. Coetzee
Image
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