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 GORDIMERThe solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
-
-
Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Communists are the last optimists.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
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 -
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
NADINE GORDIMER -
There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Music has no limits of a life-span.
NADINE GORDIMER -
The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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 -
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 -
Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
NADINE GORDIMER -
The 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 GORDIMER -
Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
NADINE GORDIMER -
September 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 GORDIMER -
Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
NADINE GORDIMER -
You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
NADINE GORDIMER -
I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
NADINE GORDIMER -
When 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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
NADINE GORDIMER -
A desert is a place without expectation.
NADINE GORDIMER