Top 160 J. M. Coetzee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When all else fails, philosophize.”

— J. M. Coetzee

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

— J. M. Coetzee

3. “The barbarians come out at night.”

— J. M. Coetzee

4. “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.”

— J. M. Coetzee

5. “In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.”

— J. M. Coetzee

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

6. “Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That’s what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?”

— J. M. Coetzee

7. “The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.”

— J. M. Coetzee

8. “It is a world of words that creates a world of things.”

— J. M. Coetzee

9. “Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.”

— J. M. Coetzee

10. “Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.”

— J. M. Coetzee

11. “Because a women’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.”

— J. M. Coetzee

12. “Reason is simply a vast tautology.”

— J. M. Coetzee

13. “We are not by nature cruel.”

— J. M. Coetzee

14. “No papers, no money; no family, no friends, no sense of who you are. The obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy.”

— J. M. Coetzee

15. “Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.”

— J. M. Coetzee

16. “Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.”

— J. M. Coetzee

17. “I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world.”

— J. M. Coetzee

18. “I don’t think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.”

— J. M. Coetzee

19. “We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.”

— J. M. Coetzee

20. “Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.”

— J. M. Coetzee

21. “A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.”

— J. M. Coetzee

22. “All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.”

— J. M. Coetzee

23. “Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.”

— J. M. Coetzee

24. “Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.”

— J. M. Coetzee

25. “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.”

— J. M. Coetzee

26. “I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.”

— J. M. Coetzee

27. “I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.”

— J. M. Coetzee

28. “Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined.”

— J. M. Coetzee

29. “Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wrong.”

— J. M. Coetzee

30. “If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.”

— J. M. Coetzee

31. “Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.”

— J. M. Coetzee

32. “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.”

— J. M. Coetzee

33. “Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets.”

— J. M. Coetzee

34. “For I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow.”

— J. M. Coetzee

35. “I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.”

— J. M. Coetzee

36. “Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.”

— J. M. Coetzee

37. “The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.”

— J. M. Coetzee

38. “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

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

— J. M. Coetzee

40. “For, seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology.”

— J. M. Coetzee

41. “Long visits don’t make for good friends.”

— J. M. Coetzee

42. “Was it serious? I don’t know. It certainly had serious consequences.”

— J. M. Coetzee

43. “Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him.”

— J. M. Coetzee

44. “What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded – God knows how – in making thousands and millions of individual human beings, lock well enought into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.”

— J. M. Coetzee

45. “Unbelief is a belief.”

— J. M. Coetzee

46. “In the act of writing he experiences, today, an exceptional sensual pleasure – in the feel of the pen, snug in the crook of his thumb, but even more in the feel of his hand being tugged back lightly from its course across the page by the strict, unvarying shape of the letters, the discipline of the alphabet.”

— J. M. Coetzee

47. “Faith means believing in what you do even when it does not bear visible fruit.”

— J. M. Coetzee

48. “It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet.”

— J. M. Coetzee

49. “To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.”

— J. M. Coetzee

50. “In my own terms, I am being punished for what happened... I am sunk into a state of disgrace from which it will not be easy to lift myself. It is not a punishment I have refused. I do not murmur against it. On the contrary, I am living it out from day to day, trying to accept disgrace as my state of being. Is it enough for God, do you think, that I live in disgrace without term?”

— J. M. Coetzee