“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.”
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)
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Nadine Gordimer 57
South african Nobel-winning writer 1923–2014Related quotes
“The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.”
Accepting Edward MacDowell Medal (September 8, 1979).
“You were made by God and for God and until you understand that, life will never make sense.”
My View of the World (1961)
Context: This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear; tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as "I am in the east and the west, I am above and below, I am this entire world."
"Assorted Landmines", p. 148
Awareness (1992)
Context: As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to the mind. Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made. Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.
