As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everyth… - J. M. Coetzee

But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other! The girl lies in my bed, but there is no good reason why it should be a bed. I behave in some ways like a lover — I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her — but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.

A French or English writer has thousands of years of written tradition behind him…We on the other hand are heirs to an oral tradition.

[Being peppered with invitations to travel far and wide to give lectures] has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.