In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
NADINE GORDIMERAbout 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
-
-
Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.
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 -
The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
NADINE GORDIMER -
The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind’s eye only, fade out in sand.
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 -
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 -
As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.
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 -
Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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 -
Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
NADINE GORDIMER