Nadine Gordimer: Quotes about life

“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.”

Nadine Gordimer

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.

Life , Truth , Imagination

“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.”

Nadine Gordimer

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)

Life , Sense

“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.”

Nadine Gordimer

Life , Books , Time

“Since humans became self-regarding they have sought, as well, explanations for the common phenomena of procreation, death, the cycle of seasons, the earth, sea, wind and stars, sun and moon, plenty and disaster. With myth, the writer's ancestors, the oral story-tellers, began to feel out and formulate these mysteries, using the elements of daily life — observable reality — and the faculty of the imagination — the power of projection into the hidden — to make stories.”

Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

Life , Death , Feeling , Imagination

“Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.”

Nadine Gordimer

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

Life , Way , Learning