Cees Nooteboom Quotes

Netherlands, Writer
July 31, 1933

Cees Nooteboom is a Dutch novelist, poet, and journalist. After the attention received by his novel Rituelen (Rituals, which received the Pegasus Prize, it was the first of his novels to be translated into an English edition, published in 1983 by Louisiana State University Press of the United States. LSU Press published his first two novels in English in the following years, as well as other works through 1990. Harcourt (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and Grove Press have since published some of his works in English.

Also known as Novelist, Poet, Journalist

I find it unbearable to need a body in order to exist.

Cees Nooteboom
- Body
- Needs
- Order
Surely one zoo in the world should have the courage to draw the ultimate conclusion about our ancestry? A cage with Homo Sapiens in all its varying forms, perhaps then we would understand ourselves better. The question of course is whether the other animals would approve of it.

Cees Nooteboom
- World
- Animal
- Conclusion

Man has been thrown into the world. It had always made him think of Icarus and those other great tumblers, Ixion, Phaeton, Tantalus - all these jumpers without parachutes from a world of gods and heroes.

Cees Nooteboom
- World
- Thrown
- Parachutes
Man is a sad mammal that combs its hair.

Cees Nooteboom
- Hair
- Mammals
- Combs
I have never cared much for people. Most of them are cowards, conformists, muddleheads, moneygrubbers, and they infect each other.

Cees Nooteboom
- People
- Life
- Coward
So-called real life has only once interfered with me, and it had been a far cry from what the words, lines, books had prepared me for. Fate had to do with blind seers, oracles, choruses announcing death, not with panting next to the refrigerator, fumbling with condoms, waiting in a Honda parked round the corner and surreptitious encounters in a Lisbon hotel. Only the written word exists, everything one must do oneself is without form, subject to contingency without rhyme or reason. It takes too long. And if it ends badly the metre isn't right, and there's no way to cross things out.

Cees Nooteboom
- Long
- Real
- Book
I am a hindrance to the world, and the world is a hindrance to me.

Cees Nooteboom
- Life
- World
- Hindrance
Conversations consist for the most part of things one does not say.

Cees Nooteboom
- Conversation

Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases.

Cees Nooteboom
- Memories
- Dog
- Lying
Through men ... you learn how the world is. Through women you learn what it is.

Cees Nooteboom
- World
- Men
He regarded life as a rather odd club of which he had accidentally become a member and from which one could be expelled without reasons having to be supplied. He had already decided to leave the club if the meetings should become all too boring. But how boring is boring?

Cees Nooteboom
- Life
- Reason
- Boring
Language is something you inherit, it's never just you doing the talking, which helps when you're pretending.

Cees Nooteboom
- Language
- Helping
- Talking
The world is a never-ending cross-reference.

Cees Nooteboom
- World
- Crosses
She had nothing to do all day ... but did it with the greatest possible speed.

Cees Nooteboom
- Life
- Speed

As far as he could see, the world was moving, in an orderly capitalist fashion, toward a logical, perhaps provisional, perhaps permanent, end.

Cees Nooteboom
- Life
- World
- Fashion