Nadine Gordimer Quotations

Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag.

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

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.

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

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

when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.