Nadine Gordimer quotes

Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer and political activist, renowned for her powerful novels and short stories confronting apartheid. Her literary works explored complex social and moral issues in South Africa. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature for her outstanding contribution to world literature. Here are 97 of her quotes:

A desert is a place without expectation. (Nadine Gordimer)

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

Nadine Gordimer

Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

Nadine Gordimer

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.

Nadine Gordimer

I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.

Nadine Gordimer

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

Nadine Gordimer

Communists are the last optimists.

Nadine Gordimer

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

Nadine Gordimer

The facts are always less than what really happened.

Nadine Gordimer

The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.

Nadine Gordimer

Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next. (Nadine Gordimer)

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

Nadine Gordimer

I'm a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can't see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.

Nadine Gordimer

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

Nadine Gordimer

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

Nadine Gordimer

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

Nadine Gordimer

Music has no limits of a life-span.

Nadine Gordimer

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

Nadine Gordimer

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.

Nadine Gordimer

My answer is: Recognize yourself in others.

Nadine Gordimer

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. (Nadine Gordimer)

Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.

Nadine Gordimer

People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.

Nadine Gordimer

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

Nadine Gordimer

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

Nadine Gordimer

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Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer - Image

Photo: Boberger. Photo: Bengt Oberger, CC BY 3.0

Occupation: African Novelist
Born: November 20, 1923
Died: July 13, 2014
Quotes count: 97
Wikipedia: Nadine Gordimer

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