More Quotes by J. M. Coetzee
Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.
I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.
The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.
We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
I am not the we of anyone.
Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
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.
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
