The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
NADINE GORDIMERThe tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
NADINE GORDIMERIf you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
NADINE GORDIMERThe 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 GORDIMERIn 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 GORDIMERYou can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
NADINE GORDIMERBooks dont need batteries
NADINE GORDIMERIf one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.
NADINE GORDIMERVery 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 GORDIMERHumans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
NADINE GORDIMERTime is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
NADINE GORDIMERIt was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
NADINE GORDIMERNothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
NADINE GORDIMERCensorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
NADINE GORDIMERThe creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
NADINE GORDIMERThe caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
NADINE GORDIMERa 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