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Nadine Gordimer: 114 quotes2 likes

“Both Borges and Sartre, from their totally different extremes of denying literature a social purpose, were certainly perfectly aware that it has its implicit and unalterable social role in exploring the state of being, from which all other roles, personal among friends, public at the protest demonstration, derive. Borges was not writing for his friends, for he published and we all have received the bounty of his work. Sartre did not stop writing, although he stood at the barricades in 1968.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

“Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.”

Nadine Gordimer

"Censorship and its Aftermath" (June 1990)

“I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.”

Nadine Gordimer

"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

“When I began to write as a very young person in a rigidly racist and inhibited colonial society, I felt, as many others did, that I existed marginally on the edge of the world of ideas, of imagination and beauty. These, taking shape in poetry and fiction, drama, painting and sculpture, were exclusive to that distant realm known as 'overseas.”

Nadine Gordimer

Speech at the Nobel Banquet (1991)

“Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

“The writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats's beast slouching to be born.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

“I opened the telegram and said, "He's dead —" and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say.”

Nadine Gordimer book The Late Bourgeois World

The Late Bourgeois World (1966) (first lines)

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

Nadine Gordimer

Rosa Burger in Burger's Daughter (1979), p. 130

“A desert is a place without expectation.”

Nadine Gordimer

Yonder Mark (ed.), The Quotable Gordimer, 2014.

“Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.”

Nadine Gordimer

As quoted at ContemporaryWriters.com http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth03D25I553012635618

“Most imprisoned writers have been shut away for their activities as citizens striving for liberation against the oppression of the general society to which they belong. Others have been condemned by repressive regimes for serving society by writing as well as they can; for this aesthetic venture of ours becomes subversive when the shameful secrets of our times are explored deeply, with the artist's rebellious integrity to the state of being manifest in life around her or him; then the writer's themes and characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and distortions of that society as the life of the fisherman is determined by the power of the sea.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

“Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.”

Nadine Gordimer

"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.”

Nadine Gordimer

"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.”

Nadine Gordimer

Speech at the Nobel Banquet (1991)

“Myth was the mystery plus the fantasy — gods, anthropomorphized animals and birds, chimera, phantasmagorical creatures — that posits out of the imagination some sort of explanation for the mystery. Humans and their fellow creatures were the materiality of the story, but as Nikos Kazantzakis once wrote, 'Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

“Literary scholars end up being some kind of storyteller, too.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

“Death's the discarder.”

Nadine Gordimer

Yonder Mark (ed.), The Quotable Gordimer, 2014.