South African - Author | February 9, 1940 -
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.
J. M. Coetzee
LifeLoveDeathWorldBusyBody
South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.
PeoplePrisonLiteratureYouKind
In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.
SufferingOrderCruelHeartsClose
In becoming a citizen, one undertakes certain duties and responsibilities. One of the more intangible of those duties and responsibilities is no matter what one's birth and background, to accept the historical past of the new country as one's own.
PastCountryNewCitizenAcceptOwn
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.
CultureMindInfluenceStrongWhole
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.
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In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.
LifeThoughtSomeoneLiteratureDays
All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.
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We are not by nature cruel.
NatureCruel
The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.
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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.
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The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.
HumanConsciousnessDifferentQuite
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