“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”
"Leaving School—II", London Magazine (May 1963) http://www.thelondonmagazine.org/leaving-school-ii/ http://www.thelondonmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/May-1963-Cover.jpg
Works
The House Gun
Nadine Gordimer
Burger's Daughter
Nadine Gordimer
The Late Bourgeois World
Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer:
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Famous Nadine Gordimer Quotes
Yonder Mark (ed.), The Quotable Gordimer, 2014.
Source: Conversations With Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer Quotes about life
Interview with Jannika Hurwitt, published in Paris Review, 88 (Summer 1983) 82–127; reprinted in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Sixth Series (1984) (the interview took place in two parts: fall 1979/spring 1980)
Writing and Being (1991)
“Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.”
As quoted at ContemporaryWriters.com http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth03D25I553012635618
Writing and Being (1991)
Context: I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. The life, the opinions, are not the work, for it is in the tension between standing apart and being involved that the imagination transforms both. Let me give some minimal account of myself. I am what I suppose would be called a natural writer. I did not make any decision to become one. I did not, at the beginning, expect to earn a living by being read. I wrote as a child out of the joy of apprehending life through my senses — the look and scent and feel of things; and soon out of the emotions that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written word.
Nadine Gordimer: Trending quotes
Speech at the Nobel Banquet (1991)
Context: I certainly find being the recipient at this celebratory dinner more pleasurable and rewarding than chicken-pox, having now in my life experienced both. But the small girl was not entirely wrong. Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations.
“The process of standing apart and being involved has come.”
Writing and Being (1991)
Context: With adolescence comes the first reaching out to otherness through the drive of sexuality. For most children, from then on the faculty of the imagination, manifest in play, is lost in the focus on day dreams of desire and love, but for those who are going to be artists of one kind or another the first life-crisis after that of birth does something else in addition: the imagination gains range and extends by the subjective flex of new and turbulent emotions. There are new perceptions. The writer begins to be able to enter into other lives. The process of standing apart and being involved has come.
Nadine Gordimer Quotes
Speech at the Nobel Banquet (1991)
Context: What we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place. If the Nobel awards have a special meaning, it is that they carry this concept further. In their global eclecticism they recognize that no single society, no country or continent can presume to create a truly human culture for the world. To be among laureates, past and present, is at least to belong to some sort of one world.
Writing and Being (1991)
Context: In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, signified God's Word, the word that was Creation. But over the centuries of human culture the word has taken on other meanings, secular as well as religious. To have the word has come to be synonymous with ultimate authority, with prestige, with awesome, sometimes dangerous persuation, to have Prime Time, a TV talk show, to have the gift of the gab as well as that of speaking in tongues. The word flies through space, it is bounced from satellites, now nearer than it has ever been to the heaven from which it was believed to have come.
Writing and Being (1991)
Context: Like the prisoners incarcerated with the jaguar in Borges' story, 'The God's Script', who was trying to read, in a ray of light which fell only once a day, the meaning of being from the marking on the creature's pelt, we spend our lives attempting to interpret through the word the readings we take in the societies, the world of which we are part. It is in this sense, this inextricable, ineffable participation, that writing is always and at once an exploration of self and of the world; of individual and collective being.
“The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can.”
Writing and Being (1991)
Context: Camus dealt with the question best. He said that he liked individuals who take sides more than literatures that do. 'One either serves the whole of man or does not serve him at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if what has to be done must be done to serve this need, he also needs pure beauty which is the bread of his heart.' So Camus called for 'Courage in and talent in one's work.' And Márquez redefined tender fiction thus: The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can.
I believe that these two statements might be the credo for all of us who write. They do not resolve the conflicts that have come, and will continue to come, to contemporary writers. But they state plainly an honest possibility of doing so, they turn the face of the writer squarely to her and his existence, the reason to be, as a writer, and the reason to be, as a responsible human, acting, like any other, within a social context.
Writing and Being (1991)
Context: There are many proven explanations for natural phenomena now; and there are new questions of being arising out of some of the answers. For this reason, the genre of myth has never been entirely abandoned, although we are inclined to think of it as archaic. If it dwindled to the children's bedtime tale in some societies, in parts of the world protected by forests or deserts from international megaculture it has continued, alive, to offer art as a system of mediation between the individual and being. And it has made a whirling comeback out of Space, an Icarus in the avatar of Batman and his kind, who never fall into the ocean of failure to deal with the gravity forces of life.
“Presence of death standing by makes a sacrament of tenuous relationships.”
Yonder Mark (ed.), The Quotable Gordimer, 2014.
Writing and Being (1991)
Writing and Being (1991)
Speech at the Nobel Banquet (1991)
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (1985) ed. Sterling McMurrin
“Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.”
"The conscience of South Africa talks about her country's new racial order" (1998) by Dwight Garner
“As a writer, I'm a composite intelligence.”
Yonder Mark (ed.), The Quotable Gordimer, 2014.
“You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.”
"'A feeling of realistic optimism': An interview with Nadine Gordimer" by Karen Lazar, Salmagundi 113 (Winter 1997)
Writing and Being (1991)
"Great Problems in the Street," in I Will Still Be Moved (1963) ed. by Marion Friedmann
Writing and Being (1991)
"Censorship and its Aftermath" (June 1990)
“I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.”
"The conscience of South Africa talks about her country's new racial order" (1998) by Dwight Garner http://web.archive.org/web/20000302013506/http://www.salon.com/books/int/1998/03/cov_si_09int.html
Speech at the Nobel Banquet (1991)
Writing and Being (1991)
The Late Bourgeois World (1966) (first lines)
“Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.”
Rosa Burger in Burger's Daughter (1979), p. 130
As quoted at ContemporaryWriters.com http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth03D25I553012635618
Writing and Being (1991)
"The conscience of South Africa talks about her country's new racial order" (1998) by Dwight Garner
“Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.”
"The Essential Gesture" (12 October 1984)
“We must live fully in order to secrete the substance of our work, but we have to work alone.”
Speech at the Nobel Banquet (1991)
Writing and Being (1991)
