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.

Elfriede Jelinek

Every day, a piece of music, a short story, or a poem dies because its existence is no longer justified in our time. And things that were once considered immortal have become mortal again, no one knows them anymore. Even though they deserve to survive.

He lies like a book. And he reads a lot of books.

Vice is basically the love of failure.

Art and order, the relatives that refuse to relate.

The first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better.

Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.

Anna despises two classes of people: first, those who own their own homes and have cars and families, and second, everybody else. Constantly she is on the verge of exploding. With rage. A pool of pure red. The pool is filled with speechlessness that talks away at her nonstop.

No art can possibly comfort HER then, even though art is credited with so many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place.

After all, when you take a walk you're after solitude, and if the solitude won't come to you, you must go to it.

Strictly speaking, there are no holidays for art; art pursues you everywhere, and that's just fine with the artist.

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

If you really want to know, I’d rather not have been born at all. I find life very tiring. The thing’s done now, of course, and I can’t alter it. But there will always be this regret at the back of my mind, I shall never quite be able to get rid of it, and it will spoil everything. The thing to do now is to grow old quickly, to eat up the years as fast as possible, looking neither right nor left.

Real lives have no end. Real books have no end.

Nights are long when it's cold and you're waiting for a train.

My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he’s not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He’s someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.

Now I know that without mirrors we are different, we're not really the same...Maybe they had noticed us looking worriedly at other people's faces, as if we wee trying to see in them what we had become.

Horror is not unimaginable, it has neither the face of a monster nor the bat-wings of a demon. It is calm and tranquil, and it is durable, lasting whole days and nights, months; years, perhaps. It is not mortal. It strikes at the eyes, only the eyes.

Herta Müller

I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.

Women always need other women to lean on. They become friends in order to hate each other better. The more they hate each other, the more inseparable they become.

When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.

Everyday brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world's sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended.

Once upon a time they had some bad luck, and they blame everything on that.

My flesh was burning where the skin was scraped off my knees, and I was afraid that I couldn't be alive anymore with so much pain, and at the same time I knew I was alive because it hurt. I was afraid that death would find its way into me through this open knee and I quickly covered my knee with my hands.

I'm always telling myself I don't have many feelings. Even when something does affect me I'm only moderately moved. I almost never cry. It's not that I'm stronger than the ones with teary eyes, I'm weaker. They have courage. When all you are is skin and bones, feelings are a brave thing. I'm more of a coward. The difference is minimal though, I just use my strength not to cry. When I do allow myself a feeling, I take the part that hurts and bandage it up with a story that doesn't cry, that doesn't dwell on homesickness.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space...

One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it.

I convinced her that her first loyalty isn't to other people, but to her own feelings.

Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella.

Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it.

I convinced her that her first loyalty isn't to other people, but to her own feelings.

Tomas Tranströmer 

I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black case

In the middle of life, death comes
to take your measurements. The visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit
is being sewn on the sly.

Every person is a half-opened door
leading to a room for everyone.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.

I wrote so meagerly to you. But what I couldn't write
swelled and swelled like an old-fashioned airship
and drifted away at last through the night sky.

Thank you for this life! Still I miss the alternatives.

Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!
I come across the marks of roe-deer's hooves in the snow.
Language, but no words.

Mo Yan

Finally, she mused that human existence is as brief as the life of autumn grass, so what was there to fear from taking chances with your life?

People who are strangers to liquor are incapable of talking about literature.

Where there's life, death is inevitable. Dying's easy; it's living that's hard. The harder it gets, the stronger the will to live. And the greater the fear of death, the greater the struggle to keep on living.

A writer writes what he knows, in ways that are natural to him.

I sometimes think that there is a link between the decline in humanity and the increase in prosperity and comfort. Property and comfort are what people seek, but the costs to character are often terrifying.

Are women really wonderful things? Maybe they are. Yes, women are wonderful things, but when all is said and done, they aren't really “things.” 

When Communism has been realized, everyone will be a novelist.

The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of the writer.

Wind, then rain, and then the blue sky.

Alice Munro

The constant happiness is curiosity.

The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.

There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this.

Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.

Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again. 

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.

Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

Patrick Modiano

She had the right idea, old man, don't you think - to disappear before it gets too late?

You were right to tell me that in life it is not the future which counts, but the past.

Nice is a city of ghosts and specters, but I hope not to become one of them right away.

Then she lowered her arm and the gate closed behind her. That arm suddenly falling and the metallic clank of the gate shutting made me understand that from one moment to another one can lose heart.

In writing this book, I send out signals, like a lighthouse beacon in whose power to illuminate the darkness, alas, I have no faith. But I live in hope.

For me the autumn has never been a sad season. The dead leaves and the increasingly shorter days have never suggested the end of anything, but rather an expectation of the future. In Paris, there is an electricity in the air in October evenings at nightfall. Even when it is raining. I do not feel low at that hour of the day, nor do I have the sense of time flying by. I have the impression that everything is possible. The year begins in the month of October.

Svetlana Alexievich

Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.

Is there anything more frightening than people?

No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.

How can we preserve our planet on which little girls are supposed to sleep in their beds, and not lie dead on the road with unplaited pigtails? And so that childhood would never again be called war-time childhood.

Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, tortured and hypnotized me, and I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world—as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher.