Top 90 Nadine Gordimer Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.”

— Nadine Gordimer

52. “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

53. “Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.”

— Nadine Gordimer

54. “The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.”

— Nadine Gordimer

55. “The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can’t believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.”

— Nadine Gordimer

56. “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

57. “From Ernest Hemingway’s stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.”

— Nadine Gordimer

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

— Nadine Gordimer

59. “It’s easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.”

— Nadine Gordimer

60. “A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.”

— Nadine Gordimer

61. “I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.”

— Nadine Gordimer

62. “Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.”

— Nadine Gordimer

63. “Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself.”

— Nadine Gordimer

64. “The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.”

— Nadine Gordimer

65. “Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.”

— Nadine Gordimer

66. “Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.”

— Nadine Gordimer

67. “The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new.”

— Nadine Gordimer

68. “You know history better than I do, you’ve been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.”

— Nadine Gordimer

69. “Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.”

— Nadine Gordimer

70. “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

71. “To discover the exact location of a ‘thing’ is a simple matter of factual research. To discover the exact location of a person: where to locate the self?”

— Nadine Gordimer

72. “I’ll go back. I’ll go back through that Kruger Park. After the war, if there are no bandits any more, our mother may be waiting for us. And maybe when we left our grandfather, he was only left behind, he found his way somehow, slowly, through the Kruger Park, and he’ll be there. They’ll be home, and I’ll remember them.”

— Nadine Gordimer

73. “Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.”

— Nadine Gordimer

74. “Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.”

— Nadine Gordimer

75. “It’s absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It’s a betrayal of whatever talent you have.”

— Nadine Gordimer

76. “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

77. “Communists are the last optimists.”

— Nadine Gordimer

78. “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

79. “If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.”

— Nadine Gordimer

80. “About the joys and the courage, I really don’t know what other people think. I just know that I’ve never left Africa. I’ve lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.”

— Nadine Gordimer

81. “Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.”

— Nadine Gordimer

82. “September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.”

— Nadine Gordimer

83. “The past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight – all their lives.”

— Nadine Gordimer

84. “Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.”

— Nadine Gordimer

85. “I never talk about what I’m writing about currently, never. It’s private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.”

— Nadine Gordimer

86. “Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.”

— Nadine Gordimer

87. “In every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together.”

— Nadine Gordimer

88. “Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.”

— Nadine Gordimer

89. “You can’t be afraid to do good in case evil results.”

— Nadine Gordimer

90. “Love doesn’t cast out fear but makes it possible to weep, howl, at least.”

— Nadine Gordimer

91. “One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.”

— Nadine Gordimer

92. “I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.”

— Nadine Gordimer

93. “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

94. “Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.”

— Nadine Gordimer

95. “So everything is something else.”

— Nadine Gordimer