I don’t think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.
NADINE GORDIMERKeenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
-
-
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 -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
NADINE GORDIMER -
You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
NADINE GORDIMER -
when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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 -
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 -
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 -
A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
NADINE GORDIMER -
In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
NADINE GORDIMER -
What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there’s another force from inside battling to make us something else.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
NADINE GORDIMER -
From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
NADINE GORDIMER