Life & Wisdom Quote by J. M. Coetzee

Coetzee is cutting against the prestige economy of ideas. Fiction, he insists, isn’t a junior branch of philosophy where characters merely launder arguments into something readable. Calling it “the invention and development of fantasies” sounds almost dismissive on purpose, as if to strip the art form of the sanctimony that gathers around “serious” literature. The move is sly: by refusing to frame fiction as “abstract thought,” he protects it from being judged by the wrong standards - logical rigor, conceptual novelty, the neatness of conclusions.

The key tension sits in his careful concession: “I don’t wish to deny the uses of the intellect.” That’s not modesty; it’s a preemptive strike against the predictable charge of anti-intellectualism. He’s after something narrower and more corrosive: the suspicion that intellect alone can become a closed loop, a machine that keeps producing reasons without producing knowledge. “Will lead one nowhere” is the tell. It’s not that thinking is useless; it’s that certain kinds of thinking can be perfectly coherent and still morally, emotionally, or politically sterile.

Coming from a writer associated with ethical discomfort and the limits of liberal rationality, the subtext is about where literature does its real work: not in proving, but in exposing; not in solving, but in staging collisions between desire, violence, and self-justification. Coetzee’s “intuition” is a quiet vote for the non-discursive forms of understanding - the way a story can corner you into recognition when argument only invites you to debate.