Once you have some sort of reputation in the outside world, they will try to woo you. They will say, "Won't you come and be on a talk program about books? That's not political." Then they can say to the outside world, "See how free it is, she appears on television. See how free it is." So I refused to… — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share
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
If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did.… — 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 for their kind.” — 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 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 planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share
