Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more – absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.
NADINE GORDIMERFiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
-
-
Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.
NADINE GORDIMER -
In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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 -
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 -
Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.
NADINE GORDIMER -
About the joys and the courage, I really don’t know what other people think. I just know that I’ve never left Africa. I’ve lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.
NADINE GORDIMER -
The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can’t believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.
NADINE GORDIMER -
When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.
NADINE GORDIMER -
One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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 -
Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.
NADINE GORDIMER -
All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Books dont need batteries
NADINE GORDIMER -
It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
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 country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
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 -
In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.
NADINE GORDIMER -
September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.
NADINE GORDIMER -
The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind’s eye only, fade out in sand.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
NADINE GORDIMER -
The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
NADINE GORDIMER -
when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
NADINE GORDIMER