Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
NADINE GORDIMERFrom Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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.
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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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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.
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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Perhaps 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.
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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
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Very 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.
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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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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.
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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
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Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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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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Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
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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.
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I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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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.
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You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
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Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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