Nadine Gordimer Quotes

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

'Even the cat buries its dirt; I carry mine around with me.' She thought of saying it aloud many times in the weeks after she came home from the hospital.

The will is my own. The emotion's my own. The right to be inconsolable. When I feel, there's no 'we', only 'I'.

What had Aila done to assuage his anguish at Baby's attempt to end her life before it had begun? Nothing. Silence. Silence upon the other silence. Comfort and understanding he had had to find elsewhere.

As a writer, I'm a composite intelligence.

I'm an atheist. I wouldn't even call myself an agnostic. I am an atheist.

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

The writer in relation to the nature of perceivable reality and what is beyond — imperceivable reality — is the basis for all these studies, no matter what resulting concepts are labelled, and no matter in what categorized microfiles writers are stowed away for the annals of literary historiography. Reality is constructed out of many elements and entities, seen and unseen, expressed, and left unexpressed for breathing-space in the mind.

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

An accolade, one side a white cheek, the other a black. The white one she kissed on the left cheek, the black one on the right, as if these were two sides of one face.

Dangers are relative, over time and distance; fear is relative, whether it menaces a multitude or a single life, but it always demands the same answers: a yes, or a no. Capitulate within oneself, or refuse to submit to attrition, fear that eats the soul.

People in the farming community understand how he must feel. Bad enough to have killed a man, without helping the Party’s, the government’s, the country’s enemies, as well.

Just before light, when it's supposed to be darkest, the body's at its lowest ebb and in the hospital on the hill old people die the night opens, a Black hole between stars, and from it comes a deep panting. Very distant and at once very close, right in the year, for the sound of breath is always intimate.It grows and gorws, a rising groan lifs out of the curved bars of the cage and hangs above the whole city -- And then it drops back, sinks away, becomes panting again.

The zoo lions do no utter during the day. They yawn; wait for their ready-slaughtered kill to be tossed at them; keep their unused claws sheathed in huge harmless pads on which top-heavy, untidy heads rest,... gazing through lid-slats with what zoo visitors think of in sentimental prurience as yearning.Or once we were near the Baltic and the leviathan hooted from the night fog at sea. But would I dare to open my mouth now? Could I trust my breath to be sweet, these stale nights?

I think that as long as those of us in South Africa who are articulate are asked to go abroad, and we know we are going to be interviewed, we cannot refuse. There are so many people in South Africa, within the country, who are muzzled. And there are others who may not be muzzled within South Africa but whose passports are withdrawn, people like Bishop Desmond Tutu-a very important voice; you know, a writer is nothing compared with him. He is a big figure, a real leader, and he can't go abroad and speak. So I think that those of us who can, as long as we can, we have to use the opportunity.