Nadine Gordimer Quotes

The facts are always less than what really happened.

With adolescence comes the first reaching out to otherness through the drive of sexuality. For most children, from then on the faculty of the imagination, manifest in play, is lost in the focus on day dreams of desire and love, but for those who are going to be artists of one kind or another the first life-crisis after that of birth does something else in addition: the imagination gains range and extends by the subjective flex of new and turbulent emotions. There are new perceptions. The writer begins to be able to enter into other lives. The process of standing apart and being involved has come.

I certainly find being the recipient at this celebratory dinner more pleasurable and rewarding than chicken-pox, having now in my life experienced both. But the small girl was not entirely wrong. Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations.

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.

Flora pretended to cuddle me against the cold, but I didn't need her kind of emotional excitation. She talked about 'the girls' in there, and my mother was one of them.

in Burger’s Daughter, you could say on the face of it that it’s a book about white communists in South Africa. But to me, it’s something else. It’s a book about commitment. Commitment is not merely a political thing. It’s part of the whole ontological problem in life. It’s part of my feeling that 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.

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 past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight - all their lives.

Writers don’t only listen, they also look. Though, indeed, they do listen. I started being an eavesdropper when I was a child, picking up unexplained little bits of conversation and imagining what led to that, what drama in that couple’s life, or what happened between that child and the parent when I overheard: “Stop that! You’re being very naughty.” You know, what does it all mean?

There is more truth in my fiction than in nonfiction. I think, subconsciously, [if] I am writing an article or talking to you, there is a certain amount of self-censorship going on. But in my fiction I am writing as if I were dead. I want to say it all. I want to say everything I know.

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.

Whether or not harmful intention was premeditated, when the accused picked up the gun … was he in a state of automatism in which … there was total loss of control?

If you ask, 'What happens when we die? Why do we die?' you are asking, 'Why do we live?

My work means that we have lived in different parts of the world and in each there has always been something to be afraid of. Gangsters, extremist political groups Right and Left tossing bombs into restaurants, hijacks, holdups, a city plumb on the line of an earthquake fault. We have long had a compact, with ourselves, with life; life is dangerous. We live with that; in the one certainty that fear is the real killer.

She had not kissed on the mouth, she had not sought anonymous lips and tongues in the licence of festival. Yet she had kissed. Watching herself again, she knew that. She did not tell what happened not because her husband would suspect licence in her.