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 GORDIMERWhat 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
-
-
The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
NADINE GORDIMER -
in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
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 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 -
Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
NADINE GORDIMER -
From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
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 -
I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
NADINE GORDIMER -
It’s easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.
NADINE GORDIMER -
In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.
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 -
Communists are the last optimists.
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 -
Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
NADINE GORDIMER