Nadine Gordimer Quotes

95 Sourced Quotes

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
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

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

Nadine Gordimer
I certainly find being the recipient at this celebratory dinner more pleasurable and rewarding than chicken-pox, having now in my life experienced both. But the small girl was not entirely wrong. Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations.

Nadine Gordimer
Myth was the mystery plus the fantasy — gods, anthropomorphized animals and birds, chimera, phantasmagorical creatures — that posits out of the imagination some sort of explanation for the mystery. Humans and their fellow creatures were the materiality of the story, but as Nikos Kazantzakis once wrote, 'Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.'

Nadine Gordimer
The business of eating, which in common with a crisis or danger brings heterogeneous incompatibles comfortably together, was over and now suddenly we were all fallen apart.

Nadine Gordimer
That was one of the things she held against missionaries: how they stressed Christ's submission to humiliation, and so had conditioned the people of Africa to humiliation by the white man.

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
We were naive, because we focused on removing the apartheid government and never thought deeply enough about what would follow.

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
The caged eagle became a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment.

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
There are many proven explanations for natural phenomena now; and there are new questions of being arising out of some of the answers. For this reason, the genre of myth has never been entirely abandoned, although we are inclined to think of it as archaic. If it dwindled to the children's bedtime tale in some societies, in parts of the world protected by forests or deserts from international megaculture it has continued, alive, to offer art as a system of mediation between the individual and being. And it has made a whirling comeback out of Space, an Icarus in the avatar of Batman and his kind, who never fall into the ocean of failure to deal with the gravity forces of life.

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

Nadine Gordimer
Television and newspapers show people's lives at a certain point. But novels tell you what happened after the riot, what happened when everybody went home.

Nadine Gordimer