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“I have not entered her. From the beginning my desire has not taken on that direction, that directedness. Lodging my dry old man’s member in that blood-hot sheath makes me think of acid in milk, ashes in honey, chalk in bread. When I look at her naked body and my own, I find it impossible to believe that once upon a time I imagined the human form as a flower radiating out from a kernel in the loins. These bodies of hers and mine are diffuse, gaseous, centreless, at one moment spinning about a vortex here, at another curdling, thickening elsewhere; but often also flat, blank. I know what to do with her no more than one cloud in the sky knows what to do with another.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

“Before Schopenhauer, the artist was generally seen as someone who manufactured things – things that were admittedly difficult to manufacture, and of a special order, such as concertos, sculptures and plays – but it was still a matter of manufacture. This is, of course, a legitimate point of view – and Schopenhauer would be the last person to overlook the difficulties in conceiving and executing a work of art. (People these days sometimes try to get back to this idea in order to minimize art, to make it a little more harmless, as when novelists are considered as mere story tellers, and contemporary artists chatter about their craft.) But the original point, the generating point of all creation, is fundamentally quite different; it consists in an innate (and thus not teachable) disposition for a passive and, as it were, dumbstruck contemplation of the world. The artist is always someone who might just as well do nothing but immerse himself contentedly in the world and in the vague daydream associated with it. Today, when art has become accessible to the masses and generates considerable financial flows, this has very comical consequences. Thus, the ambitious and enterprising individual with a range of social skills who nurses the ambition to have a career in art will rarely succeed; the palm will always go to pathetic blob-like folk who everyone initially thought were just losers.”
― Michel Houellebecq, In the Presence of Schopenhauer

“Seated at his own desk looking out on the overgrown garden, he marvels at what the little banjo is teaching him. Six months ago he had thought his own ghostly place in Byron in Italy would be somewhere between Teresa’s and Byron’s: between a yearning to prolong the summer of the passionate body and a reluctant recall from the long sleep of oblivion. But he was wrong. It is not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, but the comic. He is in the opera neither as Teresa nor as Byron nor even as some blending of the two: he is held in the music itself, in the flat, tinny slap of the banjo strings, the voice that strains to soar away from the ludicrous instrument but is continually reined back, like a fish on a line. So this is art, he thinks, and this is how it does its work! How strange! How fascinating!”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“it is also, according to Nietzsche, a lesson in style (because morality and style are two sides of the same coin): ‘Schopenhauer’s rough and somewhat bear-like soul teaches us not so much to feel the absence of the suppleness and courtly charm of good French writers as to disdain it’.17 Did Nietzsche always draw all the consequences of this? Houellebecq certainly did: it is no coincidence if he constantly replies to all those who eternally reproach him for lack of style by quoting Schopenhauer’s famous saying ‘the first – and virtually the only – condition of a good style is having something to say’.”
― Michel Houellebecq, In the Presence of Schopenhauer