Books dont need batteries
NADINE GORDIMERIn 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
-
-
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 -
I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
NADINE GORDIMER -
In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Writing is making sense of life.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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 -
it’s impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren’t taken into account because no one knows what they will be.
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 -
Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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 -
Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one’s reactions, answerable to no one’s views.
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 -
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 -
Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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 -
There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
NADINE GORDIMER -
The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Communists are the last optimists.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
NADINE GORDIMER -
The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
NADINE GORDIMER -
One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
NADINE GORDIMER -
You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
NADINE GORDIMER