Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life. — 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
Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued. — Nadine Gordimer Copy Share Image
Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship. — 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings. — 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 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
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
