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J. M. Coetzee


South African
February 9, 1940
Author
sun pond water nature landscape
The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself.


J. M. Coetzee
Tags: Truth Tell End
I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
J. M. Coetzee
sun pond water nature landscape
In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.


J. M. Coetzee
Tags: Our Other Order
Elizabeth, Lady C, claims to be writing at the limits of language. Would it not be insulting to her if I were diligently to follow after her, explaining what she means but is not smart enough to say?
J. M. Coetzee
Tags: Would Were Say
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Tags: Work About World
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Tags: More Than Going
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.
J. M. Coetzee
Tags: People About Them
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.
J. M. Coetzee