Nadine Gordimer - Writing Quotes

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Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

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
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
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
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
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 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
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
You have to become involved with life, not only in personal relationships but for social causes. But at the same time, you have to stand apart to pursue your writing, to struggle with words to define the whole question of being and existence. They were being tortured and there I was, shutting myself away to write.

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
What a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.

Nadine Gordimer
Both Borges and Sartre, from their totally different extremes of denying literature a social purpose, were certainly perfectly aware that it has its implicit and unalterable social role in exploring the state of being, from which all other roles, personal among friends, public at the protest demonstration, derive. Borges was not writing for his friends, for he published and we all have received the bounty of his work. Sartre did not stop writing, although he stood at the barricades in 1968.

Nadine Gordimer
If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.

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

Nadine Gordimer