I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
NADINE GORDIMERAny writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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 -
My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
NADINE GORDIMER -
Books dont need batteries
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 -
Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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 -
Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.
NADINE GORDIMER -
The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
NADINE GORDIMER -
If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
NADINE GORDIMER