Quote

Communists are the last optimists.

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
Optimists
Communists
Optimist
Communist
Lasts
Last

More quotes by Nadine Gordimer

Image
Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.
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
And this indifference is still very much present in modern South Africa. Just listen to Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer - a representative of the British elite in this country: Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
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
Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more - absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
I don't think I am a citizen of the world I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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
There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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
Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
Nadine Gordimer
Image
The facts are always less than what really happened.
Nadine Gordimer