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…

— J.M. Coetzee

“I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid…

— J.M. Coetzee

“Technically he is old enough to be her father; but then, technically one can be a father at twelve.”

— J.M. Coetzee

“I remember asking John, after Dusklands, what new project he had on the go. His answer was vague. 'There is always something…

— J.M. Coetzee

“The truth is, he tired of criticism, tired of prose measured by the yard." --Disgrace”

— J.M. Coetzee

“Since I was in flight from religion, I assumed that my classmates had to be in flight from religion too, albeit in…

— J.M. Coetzee

“Lucy was frightened, frightened near to death. Her voice choked, she could not breath, her limbs went numb. "This is not happening",…

— J.M. Coetzee

“It occurs to me that we crush insects beneath our feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, cockroaches, ants, in their various…

— J.M. Coetzee

“He sits with the pen in his hand, holding himself back from a descent into representations that have no place in the…

— J.M. Coetzee

“Do you remember Vlek, who was such a good sheepdog that she and Jakob alone could drive a whole flock past you…

— J.M. Coetzee

“We are accustomed to believe that our world was created by God speaking the Word; but I ask, may it not rather…

— J.M. Coetzee

“...from the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement?”

— J.M. Coetzee

“If he has a last thought, if there is time for a last thought, it will simply be, So this is what…

— J.M. Coetzee

“At what age , he wonders, did Origen castrate himself? Not the most graceful solution, but then ageing is not a graceful bussines.”

— J.M. Coetzee

“...he seems to be on the brink of one of his bad spells again, one of the fits of lugubrious self-pity that…

— 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…

— J.M. Coetzee

“He is not, he hopes, a sentimentalist. He tries not to sentimentalize the animals he kills, or to sentimentalize Bev Shaw. He…

— J.M. Coetzee

“But then in dreams we are always children.”

— 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…

— J.M. Coetzee

“That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system,…

— J.M. Coetzee

“The question is not, are we sorry? The question is, what lesson have we learned? The question is what are we going…

— 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…

— J.M. Coetzee

“The irony is, she must have offspring all over the district who would be happy to share their homes with her. But…

— J.M. Coetzee

“The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body.”

— J.M. Coetzee

“Fate deals you a hand, and you play the hand you are dealt. You do not whine, you do not complain. That,…

— J.M. Coetzee