Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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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.
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There is a paradox. In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state's indictment of treason, and the liberation forces' complaint of lack of blind commitment.
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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.
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Perhaps it is the positive knowledge that humans now possess the means to destroy their whole planet, the fear that they have in this way themselves become the gods, dreadfully charged with their own continued existence, that has made comic-book and movie myth escapist.
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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.
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Presence of death standing by makes a sacrament of tenuous relationships.
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Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
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I opened the telegram and said, 'He's dead -' and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say.
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We must live fully in order to secrete the substance of our work, but we have to work alone.
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I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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Being here: in a particular time and place. That is the existential position with particular implications for literature.
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Death's the discarder.
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Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
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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.
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The forces of being remain. They are what the writer, as distinct from the contemporary popular mythmaker, still engage today, as myth in its ancient form attempted to do.
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Television and newspapers show people's lives at a certain point. But novels tell you what happened after the riot, what happened when everybody went home.
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Literary scholars end up being some kind of storyteller, too.
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The writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats's beast slouching to be born.
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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.
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I was evidence of the theory that books are made out of other books . . . But I did not remain so for long, nor do I believe any potential writer could.
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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.
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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.