“ I don't know what you do about sex and I don't want to know, but this is not the way to go about it. You're what – fifty-two? Do you think a young girl finds any pleasure in going to bed with a man of… J.M. Coetzee
“ It’s that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participant… J.M. Coetzee
“ How many of the ragged workingmen who pass him in the street are secret authors of works that will outlast them: roads, walls, pylons? Immortality of a kind, a limited immortality, is not so hard to a… J.M. Coetzee
“ Yet what happened in fact? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look of peace on my face, even of bliss, bliss is not unattainable in this world. He s… J.M. Coetzee
“ Moer and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth in South Africa. J.M. Coetzee
“ No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. Not awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness theref… J.M. Coetzee
“ 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 t… J.M. Coetzee
“ Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation. J.M. Coetzee
“ I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our… J.M. Coetzee
“ There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason. J.M. Coetzee
“ What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again? J.M. Coetzee
“ Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world, or to an idea of the world... But… J.M. Coetzee
“ I have lived through an eventful year, yet understand no more of it than a babe in arms. Of all the people of this town I am the one least fitted to write a memorial. Better the blacksmith with his cr… J.M. Coetzee
“ The reason is that as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, in this time,… J.M. Coetzee
“ I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciate and enjoy many geographies, but there is only one that one feels in one’s bones. J.M. Coetzee
“ As you speak I swear I can hear words being selected, one after another, from the word-box you carry around with you, and slotted into place. That is not how a true native speak, one who is born into… J.M. Coetzee
“ Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: 'For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.' ... he... felt his hear… J.M. Coetzee
“ I urge you: don't cut short these thought-trains of yours. Follow them through to their end. Your thoughts and your feelings. Follow them through and you will grow with them. J.M. Coetzee
