Nadine Gordimer Quotes

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.

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.

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.

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.

You said: "...and I'm between two girls at the moment.' What exactly had led up to this statement that could have come at any time, that I had been ready for so long I began to forget it would ever come, and that you had been waiting to say for a specific length of time I could not know?

I like the idea of a literary patchwork, novel by novel, poem by poem, by different writers, mapping out an era, 'a continent' more and more thoroughly. No one writer can do it. (1979)

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

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.

It'll be enough to take your mind off your stomach. - When lovers cannot touch, they tease each other instead.

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.

Music has no limits of a life-span.

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.

That kind of act isn’t in the range of emotional control in which their son’s character was formed, or the contemporary ethic that men don’t own women. Therefore the act could not have been committed.

Progress is the business of making life more safe and more enjoyable . . . fuller, generally.

Duncan found her and took her to hospital. He brought her back to life. Literally. She owes her life to Duncan; or she blames him.