Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
NADINE GORDIMERThe tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
-
-
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 -
Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
NADINE GORDIMER -
A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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 -
Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
NADINE GORDIMER -
If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
NADINE GORDIMER -
The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
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 -
Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that…you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.
NADINE GORDIMER