Quote

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views.

Nadine Gordimer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Nadine Gordimer
Age: 90 †
Born: 1923
Born: November 20
Died: 2014
Died: July 13
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Scientific Editor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Views
Write
Best
Answerable
Writing
Reactions
Way
Afraid
Perhaps
Already
Dead

More quotes by Nadine Gordimer

Image
I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
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.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa
Nadine Gordimer
Image
in writing, sex doesn't matter it's the writing that matters.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
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.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
Nadine Gordimer
Image
Communists are the last optimists.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that...you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
a writer doesn't only need the time when he's actually writing - he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
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
Image
Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
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.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had ever heard of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz? He is not politically involved. Octavio Paz is a great poet, also not politically involved. The Nobel Prize is for literature, for the quality of work over the years.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
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.
Nadine Gordimer