top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Cultural quotes
"It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed "Wisdom." And then I know exactly what is going to follow: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.""
"I don't think anyone could write about another culture and get it 100 percent accurate."
"Sexual, racial, gender violence and other forms of discrimination and violence in a culture cannot be eliminated without changing culture."
"We cheer everyone who goes off to Hollywood and tells American stories but telling Australian stories is the greatest thing you can do."
"I don't think you can in any way export culture with guns or tanks."
"We could see that he was a charismatic guy who jumps over the moon and is very competitive, but nobody could have predicted what he would become to our culture."
"If the cultural elite has its way, the U.S. will be much more like Europe."
Explore more quotes by J. M. Coetzee
"The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role."
"Elizabeth, Lady C, claims to be writing at the limits of language. Would it not be insulting to her if I were diligently to follow after her, explaining what she means but is not smart enough to say?"
"As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calendar. Like May 1 or July 14 or December 25, September 11 may seem full of significance to some people, while to other people it is just another day."
"Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals."
"I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African."
"If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness."
bottom of page