The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
I never talk about what I'm writing about currently, never. It's private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place–… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present,… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
I don't understand writers who feel they shouldn't have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
a writer doesn't only need the time when he's actually writing - he or she has got to have time to think… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do;… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me,… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
I believe - I know (there are not many things I should care to dogmatize about, on the subject of writing) that… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
It's absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It's a betrayal of whatever talent you… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share
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 Copy Share
It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share
Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share
“I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.” — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share
“you like to have some cup of tea?-July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share
Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share
The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share
Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share
Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share
