Nadine Gordimer Quotes - Page 2

Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self

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

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

Writing is always a voyage of discovery.

Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Music has no limits of a life-span.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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