Nadine Gordimer Quotes
The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.
Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.
The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.
In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.
Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.
Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.
In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.
The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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.
Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
It's absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It's a betrayal of whatever talent you have.
Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.
