Nadine Gordimer Quotes

95 Sourced Quotes

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
The best way to be read is posthumously. That way it doesn't matter if you offend a friend or a relative or a lover. 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
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
When I began to write as a very young person in a rigidly racist and inhibited colonial society, I felt, as many others did, that I existed marginally on the edge of the world of ideas, of imagination and beauty. These, taking shape in poetry and fiction, drama, painting and sculpture, were exclusive to that distant realm known as 'overseas'.

Nadine Gordimer
Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.

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
The writer's imagination is the looter among other people's lives.

Nadine Gordimer
The writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties, trusts the state of being, as it is revealed, to hold somewhere in its complexity filaments of the cord of truth, able to be bound together, here and there, in art: trusts the state of being to yield somewhere fragmentary phrases of truth, which is the final word of words, never changed by our stumbling efforts to spell it out and write it down, never changed by lies, by semantic sophistry, by the dirtying of the word for the purposes of racism, sexism, prejudice, domination, the glorification of destruction, the curses and the praise-songs.

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 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
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
She filled her house with blacks, and white parsons who went around preaching Jesus was a revolutionary, and then when the police walked in she was surprised.

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

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