I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
NADINE GORDIMERYou can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Writing is making sense of life.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? 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 -
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 -
Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
NADINE GORDIMER -
From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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 -
Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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 -
I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
NADINE GORDIMER -
The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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 -
There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.
NADINE GORDIMER