Nadine Gordimer Quotes

Anyone who lives within a mile of the zoo hears lions on summer nights. A tourist could be fooled. Africa already; at last, even though he went to bed in yet another metropole.

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

Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.

There can be no global culture while there are inhabitants deprived of the ability to read, to have access to the powers of the imagination released through the written word, through literature; deprived of the intellectual and spiritual bounty of libraries.

No globalisation without a human face.

Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.

The question mark remains. It hangs over peace negotiations - that vital base for the answer an outsider who believes in justice surely must support: two fully independent states on agreed, realistic frontiers.

There are two kinds of leaders in the species humankind. There is the man or woman of personal ambition, and there is the man or woman who creates a self out of response to people's needs, the call of conscience against oppression, injustice, and sufferings of any nature within our human condition. To the one, the drive comes narrowly from within; to the other it is a charge of energy which comes in others needs and the demands these make on all of us who share humanity. Conscience is a form of solidarity.

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.

Fear. It's unacknowledged; shared by friend and foe if nothing else is.

time is on a plane of existence great writers sometimes penetrate

Can there be the phenomenon of a world state of mind?

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.

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

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