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 GORDIMERIt’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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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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.
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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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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.
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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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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.
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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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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.
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It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
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I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
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Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.
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The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
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If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
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Communists are the last optimists.
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If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.
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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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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.
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
NADINE GORDIMER