Gordimer Quotes & Sayings

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

Time is change; we measure its passing by how much things alter. — Nadine Gordimer

Communists are the last optimists. — 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

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

Death's the discarder. — Nadine Gordimer

Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag. — Nadine Gordimer

Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. — 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

Disaster is private, in its way, as love is. — Nadine Gordimer

Books don't need batteries. — 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

The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new. — 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

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why. — 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

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison. — 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

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

It's absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It's a betrayal of whatever talent you have. — 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

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral. — 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

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

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

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

Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self — Nadine Gordimer

Music has no limits of a life-span. — 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

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

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area. — Nadine Gordimer

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

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

I am an African. I am white. I, in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right. — 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

Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged. — 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

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

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

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

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

Newspapers are horror happening to other people. — Nadine Gordimer

Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views. — Nadine Gordimer

Her work sought to challenge all of us critically to reflect on the things we find comfort in believing without question. — Thabo Mbeki

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

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

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

Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter. — 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

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch. — Adam Gopnik

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

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

With an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion. — Nadine Gordimer

Writing is always a voyage of discovery. — 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 think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there. — Nadine Gordimer

At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be. — Christopher Hitchens

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

I'm happy to be a card-carrying member of the ANC. — Nadine Gordimer

Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church. — 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

There's no tiling moral about beauty. — 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

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

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

Where do whites fit in the New Africa? Nowhere, I'm inclined to sayand I do believe that it is true that even the gentlest and most westernised Africans would like the emotional idea of the continent entirely without the complication of the presence of the white man for a generation or two. But nowhere, as an answer for us whites, is in the same category as remarks like What's the use of living? in the face of the threat of atomic radiation. We are living; we are in Africa. — 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