Nadine Gordimer Quotes

I opened the telegram and said, 'He's dead.

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.

Books don't need batteries.

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.

I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.

What a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.

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

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

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.

How did I find out? I was deceiving him.

But a human being, she, she, cannot simply exist; she is a hurricane, every thought bending and crossing its coherence inside her, nothing will let her be, not for a moment. Every emotion, every thought, is invaded by another.

I don't understand writers who feel they shouldn't have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary: one has to keep in touch with that ... The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back.

Equality was not freedom, it had only been the mistaken yearning to become like the people of the town. And who wanted to become like the very ones feared and hated? Envy was not freedom.

They say (she had read somewhere) that no one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space
atoms infinitely minute, beyond conception of existence, are up there forever, from the whole world, from all time.

Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself.

About the joys and the courage, I really don't know what other people think. I just know that I've never left Africa. I've lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.

People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.

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

The pirogues came with live turtles, and with fish, with cloudy beer and wine made from bananas, palm nuts, or sorghum, and with the smoked meat of hippopotamus and crocodile. The vendors did a good trade with our crew and the passengers down at the third-class boat; the laughter, the exclamations, and the argument of bargaining were with us all day, heard but not understood, like voices in the next room. At stopping places, the people who were nourished on these ingredients of a witches' brew poured ashore across the single plank flung down for them, very human in contour, the flesh of the children sweet, the men and women strong and sometimes handsome. We, thank God, were fed on veal and ham and Brussels sprouts, brought frozen from Europe.

What it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers' days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by the struggle against the numbing of cold.

One can't measure how a mood of confidence comes about.

That's it on the maps; nature doesn't acknowledge frontiers. Neither can ecology ... Where to begin to understand what we've only got a computerspeak label for, ecosystem? Where to decide it begins.

It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women-a new job, a new town, a divorce-which really shape them ... but a long slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative ...

Communists are the last optimists.

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.

A desert is a place without expectation.

I'm happy to be a card-carrying member of the ANC.

I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.

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

A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.

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

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.

I'll go back. I'll go back through that Kruger Park. After the war, if there are no bandits any more, our mother may be waiting for us. And maybe when we left our grandfather, he was only left behind, he found his way somehow, slowly, through the Kruger Park, and he'll be there. They'll be home, and I'll remember them.

I'm asking you, it happens to interest me, is to kill the only sin we recognize.

It's the ultimate, isn't it. Is that what you mean.

No I don't.

Lies, theft, false witness, betrayal –

Go on. Adultery, blasphemy, you believe in sin. I don't think I do. I just believe in damage; don't damage. That's what [Duncan] was taught, that's what he knows – knew. So now – is to take life the only sin recognized by people like me? Unbelievers. Not like you.

Of course it's not. I've said: it's the ultimate. Nothing more terrible.

Before God. She pushes him.

Before God and man.

To discover the exact location of a 'thing' is a simple matter of factual research. To discover the exact location of a person: where to locate the self?

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

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

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

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views.

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.

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

Writing is making sense of life.

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.

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.

Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.

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

Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it's as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away.

With an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion.

I'm forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.

I don't want to know more about her; don't want to know her weaknesses or calculate them. What I have is not for her; he gives me to understand she would not know what to do with it; it's not her fault. --One is married and there is nothing to be done.-- Yet he has said to me, I would marry you if I could, meaning: I want very much to marry you. I offended him a bit by not being moved. It's other things he's said that are the text I'm living by. I really do not know if I want any form of public statement, status, code; such as marriage. There's nothing more private and personal than the life of a mistress, is there? Outwardly, no one even knows we are responsible to each other....

'This is the creature that has never been'--he told me a line of poetry about that unicorn, translated from German. A mythical creature. Un paradis inventé.

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.

That night they made love, the kind of love-making that is another country, a country of its own, not yours or mine.

I believe - I know (there are not many things I should care to dogmatize about, on the subject of writing) that writers need solitude, and seek alienation of a kind every day of their working lives. (And remember, they are not even aware when and when not they are working.) ... The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.

Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation.

There's no tiling moral about beauty.

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.

I am an African. I am white. I, in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right.

Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.

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.

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.

There was one of those sunsets beginning - the kind we've been having for months. Buildings and telephone poles were punched black against a watercolour sky into which fresh colour kept washing and spreading, higher and higher. We've never seen so high before; every day the colours go up and up to a hectic lilac, and from that, at last, comes the night. People carry their drinks outside not so much to look at the light, as to be in it. It's everywhere, surrounding faces and hair as it does the trees. It comes from a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world, from particles of dust that have risen to the upper atmosphere. Some people think it's from atomic tests; but it's said that, in Africa, we are safe from atomic fallout from the Northern Hemisphere because of the doldrums, an area where the elements lie becalmed and can carry no pollution.

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.

I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.

The desert. No seasons of bloom and decay. Just the endless turn of night and day. Out of time: and she is gazing- not over it, taken into it, for it has no measure of space, features that mark distance from here to there. In a film of haze there is no horizon, the pallor of sand, pink-traced, lilac-luminous with its own colour of faint light, has no demarcation from land to air. Sky-haze is indistinguishable from sand-haze. All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity.

Newspapers are horror happening to other people.

I don't cry. Unfortunately, I seem rather short of tears, so my sorrows have to stay inside me.

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

If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa

Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

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.

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

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.

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

I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.

Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.

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.

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

Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self

Writing is always a voyage of discovery.

You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.

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.

I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.

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.

The creative act is not pure.

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.

Death is really the mystery of life, isn't it?

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.