Nadine Gordimer Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.

You can't be afraid to do good in case evil results.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.

when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.

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

If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.

From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

There's no tiling moral about beauty.

You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.

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

Writing is always a voyage of discovery.

Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.

As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.

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

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.

Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

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.

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

Communists are the last optimists.

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.

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

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?

You don’t have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense - there’s a difference between thinking to oneself and thinking as a form of conversation, even if there are no answers.

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

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.