J. M. Coetzee
J. M. Coetzee
John Maxwell "J. M." Coetzeeis a South African novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He relocated to Australia in 2002 and lives in Adelaide. He became an Australian citizen in 2006...
NationalitySouth African
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth9 February 1940
heart animal rights
Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.
simple bridges people
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.
running ideas may
Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run.
god children play
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.
imagination imagine
Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
writing thinking style
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.
pain pleasure these-days
Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.
running dark islands
His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face.
beauty world bones
I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world.
trying answers may
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.