when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
NADINE GORDIMERIf one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
-
-
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 -
In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
NADINE GORDIMER -
As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
NADINE GORDIMER -
If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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 -
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 -
You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
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 decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn’t speak publicly.
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 -
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 -
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