J. M. Coetzee

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

When all else fails, philosophize.

The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.

If we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.

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.

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

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.

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.

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.