1
Well, cast your mind back to the books he wrote. What is the one theme that keeps recurring from book to book? It is that the woman doesn’t fall in love with the man. The man may or may not love the woman; but the woman never loves the man. What do you think that theme reflects? My guess, my highly informed guess, is that it reflects his life experience. Women didn’t fall for him–not women in their right senses. They inspected him, maybe they even tried him our. Then they moved on. .J.M. Coetzee
2
A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.J.M. Coetzee
3
Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity.J.M. Coetzee
4
Yet what happened in fact? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look of peace on my face, even of bliss, bliss is not unattainable in this world. He saw me–saw me as I was at that moment–took fright, hurriedly strapped the armour back over his heart, this time with chains and a double padlock, and stole out into the darkness.J.M. Coetzee
5
How many of the ragged workingmen who pass him in the street are secret authors of works that will outlast them: roads, walls, pylons? Immortality of a kind, a limited immortality, is not so hard to achieve after all. Why then does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?J.M. Coetzee