Nadine Gordimer Quotes

95 Sourced Quotes

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
There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

Nadine Gordimer
Most imprisoned writers have been shut away for their activities as citizens striving for liberation against the oppression of the general society to which they belong. Others have been condemned by repressive regimes for serving society by writing as well as they can; for this aesthetic venture of ours becomes subversive when the shameful secrets of our times are explored deeply, with the artist's rebellious integrity to the state of being manifest in life around her or him; then the writer's themes and characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and distortions of that society as the life of the fisherman is determined by the power of the sea.

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

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
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
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 saw this thing turn, like a flower, once picked, turning petals into bright knives in your hand. And it was so much desired, so lovely, that your fingers will not loosen, and you have only disbelief that this, of all you have ever known, should have the possibility of pain. All the time you are seeing the blood trickling a red answer slowly down your hand.

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

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

Nadine Gordimer
Like the prisoners incarcerated with the jaguar in Borges' story, 'The God's Script', who was trying to read, in a ray of light which fell only once a day, the meaning of being from the marking on the creature's pelt, we spend our lives attempting to interpret through the word the readings we take in the societies, the world of which we are part. It is in this sense, this inextricable, ineffable participation, that writing is always and at once an exploration of self and of the world; of individual and collective being.

Nadine Gordimer
We must live fully in order to secrete the substance of our work, but we have to work alone.

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

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

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