Nadine Gordimer Quotes

A desert is a place without expectation.

The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

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.

Writing is making sense of life.

I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.

What 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.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

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.

Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.

Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.

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.

In a democracy - even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-?litist one - the greatest veneration one can show the rule of law is to keep a watch on it, and to reserve the right to judge unjust laws and the subversion of the function of the law by the power of the state. That vigilance is the most important proof of respect for the law.

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.

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature

All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.

The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

Newspapers are horror happening to other people.

Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.

Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

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.

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

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.

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.

Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.

Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.

Music has no limits of a life-span.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.

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.

Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag.

My answer is: Recognize yourself in others

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.

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.

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

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.

Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.

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.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.

In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era.

Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.

It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.