A desert is a place without expectation.
NADINE GORDIMERA desert is a place without expectation.
NADINE GORDIMERRebirth. 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.
NADINE GORDIMERIf one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.
NADINE GORDIMERMostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
NADINE GORDIMERWriting is making sense of life.
NADINE GORDIMERKeenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
NADINE GORDIMERPerhaps 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 GORDIMERIt’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 GORDIMERIn 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 GORDIMERDisaster is private, in its way, as love is.
NADINE GORDIMERSeptember 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 GORDIMERThe function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
NADINE GORDIMERIf 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 GORDIMERPerhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one’s reactions, answerable to no one’s views.
NADINE GORDIMERI decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn’t speak publicly.
NADINE GORDIMERAll worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
NADINE GORDIMER