“If you ask, 'What happens when we die? Why do we die?' you are asking, 'Why do we live?” — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence. — 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
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
Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life. — 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
Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it. — 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
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
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
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
Where do whites fit in the New Africa? Nowhere, I'm inclined to say ... and I do believe that it is true… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“My work means that we have lived in different parts of the world and in each there has always been something to… — 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
“I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.” — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
