Nadine Gordimer

Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

— 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

The facts are always less than what really happened.

— Nadine Gordimer

“Death's the discarder.”

— Nadine Gordimer

It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles…

— Nadine Gordimer

Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.

— Nadine Gordimer

“I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.”

— Nadine Gordimer

“Death is really the mystery of life, isn't it?”

— Nadine Gordimer

Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.

— Nadine Gordimer

“you like to have some cup of tea?-July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has…

— Nadine Gordimer

Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation.

— 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

Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they…

— Nadine Gordimer

Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.

— Nadine Gordimer

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.

— Nadine Gordimer

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

— Nadine Gordimer

I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.

— Nadine Gordimer

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

— 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

If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa

— Nadine Gordimer

it's impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because…

— Nadine Gordimer

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

— Nadine Gordimer

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

— Nadine Gordimer

“I don't cry. Unfortunately, I seem rather short of tears, so my sorrows have to stay inside me.”

— 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