a writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing – he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.
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
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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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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.
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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.
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If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
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In 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.
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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can’t believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.
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Communists are the last optimists.
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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.
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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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.
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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.
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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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.
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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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Writing is making sense of life.
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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.
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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
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Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
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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.
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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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