Nadine Gordimer

“Books don't need batteries.”

— Nadine Gordimer

Writing is always a voyage of discovery.

— Nadine Gordimer

Books dont need batteries

— Nadine Gordimer

Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self

— Nadine Gordimer

A desert is a place without expectation.

— Nadine Gordimer

Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.

— Nadine Gordimer

“The creative act is not pure.”

— Nadine Gordimer

“How did I find out? I was deceiving him.”

— Nadine Gordimer

“I'm happy to be a card-carrying member of the ANC.”

— Nadine Gordimer

All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.

— Nadine Gordimer

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

— Nadine Gordimer

“If you ask, 'What happens when we die? Why do we die?' you are asking, 'Why do we live?”

— Nadine Gordimer

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

— Nadine Gordimer

As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.

— Nadine Gordimer

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

— Nadine Gordimer

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

— 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…

— 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

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

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

— Nadine Gordimer

Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that…

— Nadine Gordimer

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index…

— Nadine Gordimer

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

— Nadine Gordimer

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

— Nadine Gordimer

About the joys and the courage, I really don't know what other people think. I just know that I've never left Africa.…

— Nadine Gordimer

The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and…

— Nadine Gordimer

It's easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise…

— Nadine Gordimer

Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter…

— Nadine Gordimer

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life…

— Nadine Gordimer

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist…

— Nadine Gordimer

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

Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It…

— Nadine Gordimer

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

“I don't want to know more about her; don't want to know her weaknesses or calculate them. What I have is not…

— Nadine Gordimer

“The pirogues came with live turtles, and with fish, with cloudy beer and wine made from bananas, palm nuts, or sorghum, and…

— Nadine Gordimer

Where do whites fit in the New Africa? Nowhere, I'm inclined to sayand I do believe that it is true that even…

— Nadine Gordimer

The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me,…

— Nadine Gordimer

When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television…

— Nadine Gordimer

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

“My work means that we have lived in different parts of the world and in each there has always been something to…

— Nadine Gordimer