Nadine Gordimer Quotes & Sayings

Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself. — Nadine Gordimer

Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter. — Nadine Gordimer

Communists are the last optimists. — Nadine Gordimer

I don't cry. Unfortunately, I seem rather short of tears, so my sorrows have to stay inside me. — Nadine Gordimer

Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white's front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back. — Nadine Gordimer

The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars. — Nadine Gordimer

People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped. — Nadine Gordimer

Death's the discarder. — Nadine Gordimer

My answer is: Recognize yourself in others — Nadine Gordimer

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable. — Nadine Gordimer

I'm forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs. — Nadine Gordimer

When it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings. — Nadine Gordimer

Death is really the mystery of life, isn't it? — Nadine Gordimer

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be. — Nadine Gordimer

I cannot live with someone who can't live without me. — Nadine Gordimer

It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror. — Nadine Gordimer

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful. — Nadine Gordimer

I never talk about what I'm writing about currently, never. It's private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform. — Nadine Gordimer

It's impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be. — Nadine Gordimer

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch. — Nadine Gordimer

The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can't believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it. — Nadine Gordimer

Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next. — Nadine Gordimer

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. — Nadine Gordimer

But a human being, she, she, cannot simply exist; she is a hurricane, every thought bending and crossing its coherence inside her, nothing will let her be, not for a moment. Every emotion, every thought, is invaded by another. — Nadine Gordimer

Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it's as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away. — Nadine Gordimer

Equality was not freedom, it had only been the mistaken yearning to become like the people of the town. And who wanted to become like the very ones feared and hated? Envy was not freedom. — Nadine Gordimer

The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand. — Nadine Gordimer

They say (she had read somewhere) that no one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space
atoms infinitely minute, beyond conception of existence, are up there forever, from the whole world, from all time. — Nadine Gordimer

I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever. — Nadine Gordimer

That's it on the maps; nature doesn't acknowledge frontiers. Neither can ecology ... Where to begin to understand what we've only got a computerspeak label for, ecosystem? Where to decide it begins. — Nadine Gordimer

You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder. — Nadine Gordimer

Music has no limits of a life-span. — Nadine Gordimer

Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self — Nadine Gordimer

It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women-a new job, a new town, a divorce-which really shape them ... but a long slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative ... — Nadine Gordimer

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship. — Nadine Gordimer

What it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers' days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by the struggle against the numbing of cold. — Nadine Gordimer

Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship. — Nadine Gordimer

All worthwhile writing ... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued. — Nadine Gordimer

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb. — Nadine Gordimer

If you live in Europe ... things change ... but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away. — Nadine Gordimer

How did I find out? I was deceiving him. — Nadine Gordimer

Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer. — Nadine Gordimer

The desert. No seasons of bloom and decay. Just the endless turn of night and day. Out of time: and she is gazing- not over it, taken into it, for it has no measure of space, features that mark distance from here to there. In a film of haze there is no horizon, the pallor of sand, pink-traced, lilac-luminous with its own colour of faint light, has no demarcation from land to air. Sky-haze is indistinguishable from sand-haze. All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity. — Nadine Gordimer

If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa — Nadine Gordimer

The past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight - all their lives. — Nadine Gordimer

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it. — Nadine Gordimer

The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is. — Nadine Gordimer

Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it. — Nadine Gordimer

It's easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing. — Nadine Gordimer

Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society. — Nadine Gordimer

The pirogues came with live turtles, and with fish, with cloudy beer and wine made from bananas, palm nuts, or sorghum, and with the smoked meat of hippopotamus and crocodile. The vendors did a good trade with our crew and the passengers down at the third-class boat; the laughter, the exclamations, and the argument of bargaining were with us all day, heard but not understood, like voices in the next room. At stopping places, the people who were nourished on these ingredients of a witches' brew poured ashore across the single plank flung down for them, very human in contour, the flesh of the children sweet, the men and women strong and sometimes handsome. We, thank God, were fed on veal and ham and Brussels sprouts, brought frozen from Europe. — Nadine Gordimer

In every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together. — Nadine Gordimer

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice. — Nadine Gordimer

A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings. — Nadine Gordimer

I believe - I know (there are not many things I should care to dogmatize about, on the subject of writing) that writers need solitude, and seek alienation of a kind every day of their working lives. (And remember, they are not even aware when and when not they are working.) ... The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer. — Nadine Gordimer

To discover the exact location of a 'thing' is a simple matter of factual research. To discover the exact location of a person: where to locate the self? — Nadine Gordimer

You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition. — Nadine Gordimer

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being. — Nadine Gordimer

I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid. — Nadine Gordimer

You don't have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense - there's a difference between thinking to oneself and thinking as a form of conversation, even if there are no answers. — Nadine Gordimer

The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer. — Nadine Gordimer

Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season. — Nadine Gordimer

One can't measure how a mood of confidence comes about. — Nadine Gordimer

I'll go back. I'll go back through that Kruger Park. After the war, if there are no bandits any more, our mother may be waiting for us. And maybe when we left our grandfather, he was only left behind, he found his way somehow, slowly, through the Kruger Park, and he'll be there. They'll be home, and I'll remember them. — Nadine Gordimer

If you ask, 'What happens when we die? Why do we die?' you are asking, 'Why do we live? — Nadine Gordimer

At four in the afternoon the old moon bleeds radiance into the grey sky. — Nadine Gordimer

I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that. — Nadine Gordimer

Writing is making sense of life. — Nadine Gordimer

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. — Nadine Gordimer

A desert is a place without expectation. — Nadine Gordimer

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship. — Nadine Gordimer

Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation. — Nadine Gordimer

you like to have some cup of tea?-July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind. — Nadine Gordimer

Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life. — Nadine Gordimer

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity — Nadine Gordimer

If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it. — Nadine Gordimer

The creative act is not pure. — Nadine Gordimer

I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings. — Nadine Gordimer

If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down. — Nadine Gordimer

What a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life. — Nadine Gordimer

There's no tiling moral about beauty. — Nadine Gordimer

The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light. — Nadine Gordimer

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else. — Nadine Gordimer

I'm a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can't see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn. — Nadine Gordimer

Newspapers are horror happening to other people. — Nadine Gordimer

Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone. — Nadine Gordimer

In writing, sex doesn't matter; it's the writing that matters. — Nadine Gordimer

When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us. — Nadine Gordimer

Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged. — Nadine Gordimer

A writer doesn't only need the time when he's actually writing - he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people. — Nadine Gordimer

From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters. — Nadine Gordimer

In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era. — Nadine Gordimer

I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country. — Nadine Gordimer

I don't understand writers who feel they shouldn't have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary: one has to keep in touch with that ... The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back. — Nadine Gordimer

In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events. — Nadine Gordimer

I opened the telegram and said, 'He's dead. — Nadine Gordimer

My work means that we have lived in different parts of the world and in each there has always been something to be afraid of. Gangsters, extremist political groups Right and Left tossing bombs into restaurants, hijacks, holdups, a city plumb on the line of an earthquake fault. We have long had a compact, with ourselves, with life; life is dangerous. We live with that; in the one certainty that fear is the real killer. — Nadine Gordimer

Writing is always a voyage of discovery. — Nadine Gordimer

Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that ... you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time. — Nadine Gordimer

The facts are always less than what really happened. — Nadine Gordimer