Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
Nadine GordimerWhere do whites fit in the New Africa? Nowhere, I'm inclined to sayand I do believe that it is true that even the gentlest and most westernised Africans would like the emotional idea of the continent entirely without the complication of the presence of the white man for a generation or two. But nowhere, as an answer for us whites, is in the same category as remarks like What's the use of living? in the face of the threat of atomic radiation. We are living; we are in Africa.
Nadine GordimerThe caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
Nadine GordimerWhen I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us. If something happens where I live, you see it tomorrow or perhaps even at the same time it is happening there. It's not "one world" in the sense that conflicts are resolved in the world. But we are more one world in that we know what is going on and are psychologically influenced by what goes on around us.
Nadine GordimerWritten words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
Nadine GordimerSeptember 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.
Nadine GordimerIt's absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It's a betrayal of whatever talent you have.
Nadine GordimerPower is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
Nadine GordimerI believe - I know (there are not many things I should care to dogmatize about, on the subject of writing) that writers need solitude, and seek alienation of a kind every day of their working lives. (And remember, they are not even aware when and when not they are working.) ... The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
Nadine GordimerThe process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer.
Nadine GordimerWhen I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.
Nadine GordimerI couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
Nadine GordimerThe solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
Nadine GordimerThe primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
Nadine GordimerFiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
Nadine GordimerIn a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.
Nadine GordimerCan you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.
Nadine GordimerWhat 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.
Nadine GordimerI'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 GordimerI don't understand writers who feel they shouldn't have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary: one has to keep in touch with that... The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back.
Nadine GordimerIf one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa
Nadine GordimerYou can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.
Nadine GordimerPerhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views.
Nadine GordimerIn various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.
Nadine GordimerPerhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
Nadine GordimerThe creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
Nadine Gordimerit's impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be.
Nadine GordimerHumans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
Nadine Gordimer