Nadine Gordimer Quotes

95 Sourced Quotes

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 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 opened the telegram and said, "He's dead —" and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say.

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

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

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

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

Nadine Gordimer
The two women gazed out of the slumped and sagging bodies that had accumulated around them.

Nadine Gordimer
My mother and father and I now lived in the intimacy of estrangement that exists between married couples who have nothing left in common but their incompatibility.

Nadine Gordimer
Since humans became self-regarding they have sought, as well, explanations for the common phenomena of procreation, death, the cycle of seasons, the earth, sea, wind and stars, sun and moon, plenty and disaster. With myth, the writer's ancestors, the oral story-tellers, began to feel out and formulate these mysteries, using the elements of daily life — observable reality — and the faculty of the imagination — the power of projection into the hidden — to make stories.

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

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

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

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
Perhaps it is the positive knowledge that humans now possess the means to destroy their whole planet, the fear that they have in this way themselves become the gods, dreadfully charged with their own continued existence, that has made comic-book and movie myth escapist.

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
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
There is a paradox. In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state's indictment of treason, and the liberation forces' complaint of lack of blind commitment.

Nadine Gordimer
Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

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

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

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

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

Nadine Gordimer