Nadine Gordimer - Lives Quotes

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

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

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

Nadine Gordimer