J. M. Coetzee

“הברברים כרו מנהרה מתחת לחומות, אומרים האנשים; הם באים ויוצאים כחפצם, לוקחים מכל הבא לידם.”

“היטב ידוע לי המשקל שאפשר לתת ברמזים של דופי ובחצאי דברים וכיצד אפשר להציג שאלה בדרך שתקבע את תשובתה.”

“אילו עשיתי את המעשה הנבון, אפשר שהייתי יכול עתה לשוב אל הציד ואל תענוגות־הבשרים השלווים.”

“כשאני קורא את פרויד ברגעיו הפסימיים פחות, אני מגלה אצלו הד — לא מעורער כמדומה — למרשם הזה: דע את האמת, והאמת תוציא אותך לחופשי.”

“אני מאמין בצמצום. פרוזה מצומצמת ועולם מצומצם וחסכני.”

“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.”

“I read a great deal as a child. A lot of children go through a phase of reading in a literally voracious way. It is their primary imaginative activity. Maybe that's an experience which is not so common any more with the presence of television in every home.”

“Lebanon, Israel, Ireland, South Africa - wherever there is a bleeding sore on the body of the world, the same hard-eyed narrow-minded fanatics are busy, indifferent to life, in love with death.”

“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.”

“If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?”

“I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.”

“There is nothing more inimical to writing than the spirit of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism abhors the play of signs, the endlessness of writing. Fundamentalism means nothing more or less than going back to an origin and staying there. It stands for one founding book and, thereafter, no more books.”

“Everyone seems to see bleakness and despair in my books. I don't read them that way. I see myself as writing comic books, books about ordinary people trying to live ordinary, dull, happy lives while the world is falling to pieces around them.”

“All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.”

“The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.”

“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.”

“The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.”

“The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself.”

“In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.”

“Islamic fundamentalism in its activist manifestation is bad news. Religious fundamentalism in general is bad news. We know about religious fundamentalism in South Africa. Calvinist fundamentalism has been an unmitigated force of benightedness in our history.”