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 po… - Nadine Gordimer

[T]he isotopy of fragmentation constitutes a unifying web structurally present at the level of story, text, and narration

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

There was one of those sunsets beginning — the kind we've been having for months. Buildings and telephone poles were punched black against a watercolour sky into which fresh colour kept washing and spreading, higher and higher. We've never seen so high before; every day the colours go up and up to a hectic lilac, and from that, at last, comes the night. People carry their drinks outside not so much to look at the light, as to be in it. It's everywhere, surrounding faces and hair as it does the trees. It comes from a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world, from particles of dust that have risen to the upper atmosphere. Some people think it's from atomic tests; but it's said that, in Africa, we are safe from atomic fallout from the Northern Hemisphere because of the doldrums, an area where the elements lie becalmed and can carry no pollution.