There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
NADINE GORDIMERWhen 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
-
-
Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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 -
If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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 GORDIMER -
In 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 GORDIMER -
All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
NADINE GORDIMER -
The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
NADINE GORDIMER -
in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Writing is making sense of life.
NADINE GORDIMER -
A desert is a place without expectation.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Music has no limits of a life-span.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I never talk about what I’m writing about currently, never. It’s private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Communists are the last optimists.
NADINE GORDIMER -
A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
NADINE GORDIMER