Nadine Gordimer Quotes

95 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Nadine Gordimer
With adolescence comes the first reaching out to otherness through the drive of sexuality. For most children, from then on the faculty of the imagination, manifest in play, is lost in the focus on day dreams of desire and love, but for those who are going to be artists of one kind or another the first life-crisis after that of birth does something else in addition: the imagination gains range and extends by the subjective flex of new and turbulent emotions. There are new perceptions. The writer begins to be able to enter into other lives. The process of standing apart and being involved has come.

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

Nadine Gordimer
What we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place. If the Nobel awards have a special meaning, it is that they carry this concept further. In their global eclecticism they recognize that no single society, no country or continent can presume to create a truly human culture for the world. To be among laureates, past and present, is at least to belong to some sort of one world.

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.

Nadine Gordimer
The forces of being remain. They are what the writer, as distinct from the contemporary popular mythmaker, still engage today, as myth in its ancient form attempted to do.

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

Nadine Gordimer
She felt the natural ties of affinity rather than the conventional blind ties of the blood.

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
Being here: in a particular time and place. That is the existential position with particular implications for literature.

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
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
I went to the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy but there was no mercy for blacks. I went to dancing classes, blacks were not allowed. The library, which was so precious to me, again, blacks were not allowed. It impinged on my consciousness. I began to ask why.

Nadine Gordimer
You have to become involved with life, not only in personal relationships but for social causes. But at the same time, you have to stand apart to pursue your writing, to struggle with words to define the whole question of being and existence. They were being tortured and there I was, shutting myself away to write.

Nadine Gordimer
People in delirium rise and sink, rise and sink, in and out of lucidity. The swaying, shuddering, thudding, flinging stops, and the furniture of life falls into place.

Nadine Gordimer
Literary scholars end up being some kind of storyteller, too.

Nadine Gordimer
The writer in relation to the nature of perceivable reality and what is beyond — imperceivable reality — is the basis for all these studies, no matter what resulting concepts are labelled, and no matter in what categorized microfiles writers are stowed away for the annals of literary historiography. Reality is constructed out of many elements and entities, seen and unseen, expressed, and left unexpressed for breathing-space in the mind.

Nadine Gordimer
The writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats's beast slouching to be born.

Nadine Gordimer
He had the patient, practical, uninterested tone of the white person willing to help a native with money or authority, so long as he is not expected to listen to any human details of the predicament.

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
Both Borges and Sartre, from their totally different extremes of denying literature a social purpose, were certainly perfectly aware that it has its implicit and unalterable social role in exploring the state of being, from which all other roles, personal among friends, public at the protest demonstration, derive. Borges was not writing for his friends, for he published and we all have received the bounty of his work. Sartre did not stop writing, although he stood at the barricades in 1968.

Nadine Gordimer
Presence of death standing by makes a sacrament of tenuous relationships.

Nadine Gordimer