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Nadine Gordimer

South African writer

Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 – 13 July 2014) was a South African Jewish novelist and writer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in literature and 1974 Booker Prize.*, recognized as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity".[1]

Nadine Gordimer (2010)
Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.

Quotes

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  • The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
    • "Leaving School—II", The London Magazine (May 1963)[1][2]
  • The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.
    • "Great Problems in the Street," in I Will Still Be Moved (1963) ed. by Marion Friedmann
  • I opened the telegram and said, "He's dead —" and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say.
    • The Late Bourgeois World (1966) (first lines)
  • Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself — who wouldn’t make the world over if it were to be as easy as that.
    • The Conservationist (1974)
  • I like the idea of a literary patchwork, novel by novel, poem by poem, by different writers, mapping out an era, 'a continent' more and more thoroughly. No one writer can do it. (1979)
    • 1979 interview in Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990)
  • I think that the decision to be sincere is an artistic one.
    • 1982 interview in Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990)
  • 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)
  • Novelists and short-story writers provide implicitly a critique of their society…A good writer can't help revealing the truth that is in his society and by that token there is a political implication and he is politically committed. (1983)
    • 1983 interview in Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990)
  • In countries like Czechoslovakia, like South Africa, like Argentina, guilt by association is a fact and therefore the friendships you form can be a political act. This circumstance, way of life, is very complex. People think that a political act is signing a declaration or planting a bomb, but there are all kinds of political acts in countries where there is a great political struggle going on.
  • I think that as long as those of us in South Africa who are articulate are asked to go abroad, and we know we are going to be interviewed, we cannot refuse. There are so many people in South Africa, within the country, who are muzzled. And there are others who may not be muzzled within South Africa but whose passports are withdrawn, people like Bishop Desmond Tutu-a very important voice; you know, a writer is nothing compared with him. He is a big figure, a real leader, and he can't go abroad and speak. So I think that those of us who can, as long as we can, we have to use the opportunity.
    • 1984 interview in Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990)
  • Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
    • "The Essential Gesture" (12 October 1984)
  • There was no mistaking her. She was a young woman whose cultivated gentleness of expression and shabby homespun style of dress, in the context in which she was encountered, suggested not transcendental meditation centre or environmental concern group or design studio, but a sign of identification with the humanity of those who had nothing and risked themselves.
    • "Crimes of Conscience", collected in Something Out There (1984)
  • 'Even the cat buries its dirt; I carry mine around with me.' She thought of saying it aloud many times in the weeks after she came home from the hospital.
    • first lines of "Terminal", collected in Something Out There (1984)
  • 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.
    • The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (1985) ed. Sterling McMurrin
  • Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
    • "Censorship and its Aftermath" (June 1990)
  • 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.
    • None to Accompany Me (1994)
  • Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself.
    • The House Gun (1997)
  • What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates.
    • The House Gun (1997)
  • You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.
    • "'A feeling of realistic optimism': An interview with Nadine Gordimer" by Karen Lazar, Salmagundi 113 (Winter 1997)
  • Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
    • "The conscience of South Africa talks about her country's new racial order" (1998) by Dwight Garner
  • 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.
    • "The conscience of South Africa talks about her country's new racial order" (1998) by Dwight Garner
  • Can there be the phenomenon of a world state of mind?
    • "Fear Eats the Soul" (2003), included in Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008 (2010)
  • Fear. It's unacknowledged; shared by friend and foe if nothing else is.
    • "Fear Eats the Soul" (2003)
  • Dangers are relative, over time and distance; fear is relative, whether it menaces a multitude or a single life, but it always demands the same answers: a yes, or a no. Capitulate within oneself, or refuse to submit to attrition, fear that eats the soul.
    • "Fear Eats the Soul" (2003)
  • Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
    • Get a Life (2005)
  • There are two kinds of leaders in the species humankind. There is the man or woman of personal ambition, and there is the man or woman who creates a self out of response to people's needs, the call of conscience against oppression, injustice, and sufferings of any nature within our human condition. To the one, the drive comes narrowly from within; to the other it is a charge of energy which comes in others needs and the demands these make on all of us who share humanity. Conscience is a form of solidarity.

An ideology passionately held becomes a faith by which its adherents live and act.

    • "Faith, Reason and War" (2006), included in Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008 (2010)
  • The question mark remains. It hangs over peace negotiations - that vital base for the answer an outsider who believes in justice surely must support: two fully independent states on agreed, realistic frontiers.
    • about Israel and Palestine. "Experiencing Two Absolutes" (2008), included in Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008 (2010)
  • Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.
    • No Time Like the Present (2010)
  • No globalisation without a human face.
    • A Letter to Future Generations (1999), included in Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008 (2010)
  • There can be no global culture while there are inhabitants deprived of the ability to read, to have access to the powers of the imagination released through the written word, through literature; deprived of the intellectual and spiritual bounty of libraries.
    • A Letter to Future Generations (1999)
  • Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
  • Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.

A Lion on the Freeway (1950)

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  • Anyone who lives within a mile of the zoo hears lions on summer nights. A tourist could be fooled. Africa already; at last, even though he went to bed in yet another metropole.
  • Just before light, when it's supposed to be darkest, the body's at its lowest ebb and in the hospital on the hill old people die the night opens, a Black hole between stars, and from it comes a deep panting. Very distant and at once very close, right in the year, for the sound of breath is always intimate.It grows and gorws, a rising groan lifs out of the curved bars of the cage and hangs above the whole city -- And then it drops back, sinks away, becomes panting again.
  • Wait for it; it will fall so quiet, hardly more than a faint roughness snagging the air in the ear's chambers. ... And begins once more. The panting reaches up up up down down down to that awe-ful groan!
  • The zoo lions do no utter during the day. They yawn; wait for their ready-slaughtered kill to be tossed at them; keep their unused claws sheathed in huge harmless pads on which top-heavy, untidy heads rest,... gazing through lid-slats with what zoo visitors think of in sentimental prurience as yearning.Or once we were near the Baltic and the leviathan hooted from the night fog at sea. But would I dare to open my mouth now? Could I trust my breath to be sweet, these stale nights?
  • It's only on warm summer nights that the lions are restless. What they're seeing when they gaze during the day is nothing, their eyes are open but they don't see us -you can tell that when the lens of the pupil suddenlys shutters at the close swoop0 of one of the popcorn-begging pigeons through the bars of the cage. ... It's only on certain nights that their muscles flex and they begin to pant,their flanks heave as if they had been running through the dark night while other creatures shrank from their path, their jaws hang tense and wet as saliva flows as if in response to a scent of prey, at last they heave up their too-big heads, heavy, heavy heads, and out it comes. Out over the suburbs. A dreadful straining of the bowels to deliver itself; a groan that hangs above the houses in a low-lying cloud of smog and anguish.
  • No one can say what it was the white soldier said over the telephone to his commanding officer, and if the commanding officer had told him what was going to be done, or whether the white soldier knew, as a matter of procedure laid down in his military training for this kind of war, what would be done. The police found the bicycle beneath his dangling shoes. So the family hanger-on still rides it; it would have been lost if it had been safe in the kitchen when the raid came. No one knows where the chief found a rope, in the ruins of the village.

The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952)

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"The Train from Rhodesia"

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  • The young man outside. But he is not part of the unreality; he is for good now. Odd…somewhere there was an idea that he, that living with him, was part of the holiday, the strange places. The heat of shame mounted through her legs and body and sounded in her ears like the sound of sand pouring. Pouring, pouring. She sat there, sick. A weariness, a tastelessness, the discovery of a void made her hands slacken their grip, atrophy emptily, as if the hour was not worth their grasp. She was feeling like this again. She had thought it was something to do with singleness, with being alone and belonging too much to oneself.She sat there not wanting to move or speak, or to look at anything even; so that the mood should be associated with nothing, no object, word, or sight that might recur and so recall the feeling again….Smuts blew in grittily, settled on her hands. Her back remained at exactly the same angle, turned against the young man sitting with his hands drooping between his sprawled legs, and the lion, fallen on its side in the corner.The train had cast the station like a skin. It called out to the sky, I’m coming, I’m coming; and again, there was no answer.
  • The train came out of the red horizon and bore down towards them over the single straight track.
  • Creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping, the train filled the station.
  • Between its vandyke teeth, in the mouth opened in a roar too terrible to be heard, it had a black tongue.

Six Feet of the Country (1956)

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Quotes taken from 1982 Penguin Paperback Edition.
  • I should have given it up long ago if it had not been for her.
    • Narrator (Pages 7 - 10)
  • Out in the country, even ten miles out, life is better than that.
    • Narrator (Pages 7 - 10
  • The farm hasn’t managed that for us, of course, but it has done other things, unexpected, illogical.”
    • Page 7
  • And for a moment I accept the triumph as I had managed it.”
    • Page 8.
  • When Johannesburg people speak of ‘tension,’ they don’t mean hurrying people in crowded streets, the struggle for money, or the general competitive character of city life. They mean the guns under the white men’s pillows and the burglar bars on the white men’s windows. They mean those strange moments on city pavements when a [B]lack man won’t stand aside for a white man.”
    • Pages 8-9.

Burger's Daughter (1979)

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  • Among the group of people waiting at the fortress was a schoolgirl in a brown and yellow uniform holding a green eiderdown quilt and, by the loop at its neck, a red hot-water bottle. (First lines)
  • There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be.
    • page 15
  • Strong emotion - faith? - has different ways of being manifested among the different disciples within which people order their behaviour.
    • page 33
  • Communists are the last optimists.
    • Conrad, p. 42
  • Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
    • Rosa Burger, p. 130
  • The blackman is not fighting for equality with whites. Blackness is the blackman refusing to believe the whiteman's way of life is best for blacks.
    • page 163
  • The main reason why we're still where we are is blacks haven't united as blacks because we're told all the time to do it is to be racist.
    • page 163
  • Our liberation cannot be divorced from black consciousness because we cannot be conscious of ourselves and at the same time remain slaves -
    • page 164
  • When the body is no longer an attraction, an expression of desire, to bare your breasts and belly is simple; you lay like dogs or cats grateful for the sun.
    • page 239
  • But there's no indemnity. You can't be afraid to do good in case evil results.
    • page 296
  • It'll be enough to take your mind off your stomach. - When lovers cannot touch, they tease each other instead.
    • page 298

Interview with The Paris Review (1979/80)

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  • after my first trip out, I realized that “home” was certainly and exclusively—Africa. It could never be anywhere else.
  • It was Sinclair's The Jungle that really started me thinking about politics: I thought, good God, these people who are exploited in a meat-packing factory-they're just like blacks here. And the whole idea that people came to America, not knowing the language, having to struggle in sweat shops. . . I didn't relate this to my own father, because my father was bourgeois by then... but I related it to the blacks. Again, what a paradox that South Africa was the blacks' own country, but they were recruited just as if they had been migrant workers for the mines. So I saw the analogy. And that was the beginning of my thinking about my position vis-à-vis blacks. But though I didn't know anything-I was twelve or thirteen, and leading the odd kind of life I did, living in books-I began to think about these things before, perhaps, I was ready for them. When I got to university, it was through mixing with other people who were writing or painting that I got to know black people as equals. In a general and inclusive, non-racial way, I met people who lived in the world of ideas, in the world that interested me passionately. In the town where I lived, there was no mental food of this kind at all. I’m often amazed to think how they live, those people, and what an oppressed life it must be, because human beings must live in the world of ideas. This dimension in the human psyche is very important. It was there, but they didn’t know how to express it.
  • (talking about herself while she was in university) My approach to living as a white supremacist, perforce, among blacks, was, I see now, the humanist approach, the individualistic approach. I felt that all I needed, in my own behavior, was to ignore and defy the color bar. In other words, my own attitude toward blacks seemed to be sufficient action. I didn’t see that it was pretty meaningless until much later.
  • the real influence of politics on my writing is the influence of politics on people. Their lives, and I believe their very personalities, are changed by the extreme political circumstances one lives under in South Africa. I am dealing with people; here are people who are shaped and changed by politics. In that way my material is profoundly influenced by politics.
  • in Burger’s Daughter, you could say on the face of it that it’s a book about white communists in South Africa. But to me, it’s something else. It’s a book about commitment. Commitment is not merely a political thing. It’s part of the whole ontological problem in life. It’s part of my feeling that what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that’s what writing is, I think that’s what painting is. It’s seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.
  • there’s a fairly good relationship between black and white writers. Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship, and most white writers feel a strong sense of responsibility to promote, defend, and help black writers where possible.
  • it was Proust who said that style is the moment of identification between the writer and his situation. Ideally that is what it should be—one allows the situation to dictate the style.
  • Death is really the mystery of life, isn’t it? If you ask, “What happens when we die? Why do we die?” you are asking, “Why do we live?”
  • Progress is the business of making life more safe and more enjoyable . . . fuller, generally.
  • if somebody is partly frivolous or superficial, has moments of cruelty or self-doubt, I don’t write them off, because I think that absolutely everybody has what are known as human failings.
  • 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.
  • I can’t understand writers who feel they shouldn’t have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary; one has got to keep in touch with that. The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch. The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner’s or spraying some plants infected with aphids is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back.
  • I would like to say something about how I feel in general about what a novel, or any story, ought to be. It’s a quotation from Kafka. He said, “A book ought to be an ax to break up the frozen sea within us.”

A Soldier's Embrace: Stories (1980)

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  • The day the cease-fire was signed she was caught in a crowd. Peasant boys from Europe who had made up the colonial army and freedom fighters whose column had marched into town were staggering about together outside the barracks, not three blocks from her house in whose rooms, for ten years, she had heard the blurred parade-ground bellow of colonial troops being trained to kill and be killed.
    • first lines of "A Soldier's Embrace"
  • How to break in: with a name, a statement.
    • "You Name It"
  • You said: "...and I'm between two girls at the moment.' What exactly had led up to this statement that could have come at any time, that I had been ready for so long I began to forget it would ever come, and that you had been waiting to say for a specific length of time I could not know?
    • first lines of "Time Did"
  • When you live in a small town far from the world you read about in municipal library books, the advent of repair men in the house is a festival. Daily life is gaily broken open, improvisation takes over.
    • first lines of "The Termitary"
  • There were two soldiers in front of her, blocking her off by their clumsy embrace(how do you do it, how do you do what you've never done before) and the embrace opened like a door and took her in -- a pink hand with bitten nails grasping her right arm, a black hand with a big-dialled watch and thong bracelet pulling at her left elbow. Their three heads collided gaily,musk of sweat and tang of strong sweet soap clapped a mask to her nose and mouth.They all gasped wityh delicious shock.She put up an arm around each neck, the rough pile of an army haircut on one side, the soft negro hair on the other, and kissed them both on the cheek. The embrace broke.
    • Page 8
  • An accolade, one side a white cheek, the other a black. The white one she kissed on the left cheek, the black one on the right, as if these were two sides of one face.
    • p.10
  • She had not kissed on the mouth,she had not sought anonymous lips and tongues inthe licence of festival.Yet she had kissed Watching herself again,she knew that She did not tell what happened not because her husband would suspect licence in her
    • Page 11
  • She avoided walking past the barracks because of the machine guns the young sentries had in place of rifles.

My Son's Story (1990)

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  • Odd in-between period which sometimes inserts itself into historical time when not only the later historians but the actors and witnesses, the living themselves, become aware of an interval in time which is altogether determined by things that are no longer and by things that are not yet. In history, these intervals have shown more than once that they may contain the moment of truth.
    • Page 9.
  • “[T]he isotopy of fragmentation constitutes a unifying web structurally present at the level of story, text, and narration”
    • Page 28.
  • despite the fact that the narrative demonstrates that the voice of the ‘other’ can be heard and imagined, Gordimer’s attitude toward her own whiteness […] is resentful and hostile”
    • Page 71.
  • propos[ed] a future South Africa, not only on terms of equality of races but of sexes, too”
    • Page 123
  • She reminds me of pig. Our ancestors didn't eat pig.
    • Sonny's thoughts juxtaposed.
  • What had Aila done to assuage his anguish at Baby's attempt to end her life before it had begun? Nothing. Silence. Silence upon the other silence. Comfort and understanding he had had to find elsewhere.
    • Sonny reveals a major reason for his alienation from Aila.
  • It was my mother who had talked under interrogation. I know why she did. It was to be sure neither her husband nor I would be held responsible.
    • Will refers to his father as his mother's husband
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  • Underground: this time, as at other times, he's aware of how unsuitably abstract a term that is. To hide away, you have to be out in the open of life; too soon and easily run to ground, holed up somewhere. Best safety lies in crowds. ("Safe Houses")
  • Breathe.
    Breath. A baby, a chicken hatching-the first imperative is to breathe.
    Breathless.
    Breathe! Out of this concentration, in which he forgets even the rhythm of his feet, is a bellows pumped by the command, the admonition, the slap on the bottom that shocks the baby into inhalation-comes his second wind. Unless you go out like this, morning and evening, you never know what no one can remember, that first discovery of independent life: I can breathe. (beginning of "Keeping Fit")
  • That night our mother went to the shop and she didn't come back. Ever. What happened? I don't know. (beginning of "The Ultimate Safari")

Speech at the Nobel Banquet (1991)

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Full text (10 December 1991)
  • When the six-year-old daughter of a friend of mine overheard her father telling someone that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize, she asked whether I had ever received it before. He replied that the Prize was something you could get only once. Whereupon the small girl thought a moment: 'Oh' she said, 'so it's like chicken-pox.'
  • I certainly find being the recipient at this celebratory dinner more pleasurable and rewarding than chicken-pox, having now in my life experienced both. But the small girl was not entirely wrong. Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations.
  • We must live fully in order to secrete the substance of our work, but we have to work alone.
  • When I began to write as a very young person in a rigidly racist and inhibited colonial society, I felt, as many others did, that I existed marginally on the edge of the world of ideas, of imagination and beauty. These, taking shape in poetry and fiction, drama, painting and sculpture, were exclusive to that distant realm known as 'overseas'.
  • What we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place. If the Nobel awards have a special meaning, it is that they carry this concept further. In their global eclecticism they recognize that no single society, no country or continent can presume to create a truly human culture for the world. To be among laureates, past and present, is at least to belong to some sort of one world.

Writing and Being (1991)

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Nobel Lecture (7 December 1991)
  • In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, signified God's Word, the word that was Creation. But over the centuries of human culture the word has taken on other meanings, secular as well as religious. To have the word has come to be synonymous with ultimate authority, with prestige, with awesome, sometimes dangerous persuation, to have Prime Time, a TV talk show, to have the gift of the gab as well as that of speaking in tongues. The word flies through space, it is bounced from satellites, now nearer than it has ever been to the heaven from which it was believed to have come.
  • Like the prisoners incarcerated with the jaguar in Borges' story, 'The God's Script', who was trying to read, in a ray of light which fell only once a day, the meaning of being from the marking on the creature's pelt, we spend our lives attempting to interpret through the word the readings we take in the societies, the world of which we are part. It is in this sense, this inextricable, ineffable participation, that writing is always and at once an exploration of self and of the world; of individual and collective being.
  • Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
  • 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.
  • Myth was the mystery plus the fantasy — gods, anthropomorphized animals and birds, chimera, phantasmagorical creatures — that posits out of the imagination some sort of explanation for the mystery. Humans and their fellow creatures were the materiality of the story, but as Nikos Kazantzakis once wrote, 'Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.'
  • There are many proven explanations for natural phenomena now; and there are new questions of being arising out of some of the answers. For this reason, the genre of myth has never been entirely abandoned, although we are inclined to think of it as archaic. If it dwindled to the children's bedtime tale in some societies, in parts of the world protected by forests or deserts from international megaculture it has continued, alive, to offer art as a system of mediation between the individual and being. And it has made a whirling comeback out of Space, an Icarus in the avatar of Batman and his kind, who never fall into the ocean of failure to deal with the gravity forces of life.
  • Perhaps it is the positive knowledge that humans now possess the means to destroy their whole planet, the fear that they have in this way themselves become the gods, dreadfully charged with their own continued existence, that has made comic-book and movie myth escapist.
  • The forces of being remain. They are what the writer, as distinct from the contemporary popular mythmaker, still engage today, as myth in its ancient form attempted to do.
  • The writer in relation to the nature of perceivable reality and what is beyond — imperceivable reality — is the basis for all these studies, no matter what resulting concepts are labelled, and no matter in what categorized microfiles writers are stowed away for the annals of literary historiography. Reality is constructed out of many elements and entities, seen and unseen, expressed, and left unexpressed for breathing-space in the mind.
  • Literary scholars end up being some kind of storyteller, too.
  • Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
  • Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light — and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau — into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
  • 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.
  • I was evidence of the theory that books are made out of other books . . . But I did not remain so for long, nor do I believe any potential writer could.
  • With adolescence comes the first reaching out to otherness through the drive of sexuality. For most children, from then on the faculty of the imagination, manifest in play, is lost in the focus on day dreams of desire and love, but for those who are going to be artists of one kind or another the first life-crisis after that of birth does something else in addition: the imagination gains range and extends by the subjective flex of new and turbulent emotions. There are new perceptions. The writer begins to be able to enter into other lives. The process of standing apart and being involved has come.
  • Both Borges and Sartre, from their totally different extremes of denying literature a social purpose, were certainly perfectly aware that it has its implicit and unalterable social role in exploring the state of being, from which all other roles, personal among friends, public at the protest demonstration, derive. Borges was not writing for his friends, for he published and we all have received the bounty of his work. Sartre did not stop writing, although he stood at the barricades in 1968.
  • Camus dealt with the question best. He said that he liked individuals who take sides more than literatures that do. 'One either serves the whole of man or does not serve him at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if what has to be done must be done to serve this need, he also needs pure beauty which is the bread of his heart.' So Camus called for 'Courage in and talent in one's work.' And Márquez redefined tender fiction thus: The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can.
    I believe that these two statements might be the credo for all of us who write. They do not resolve the conflicts that have come, and will continue to come, to contemporary writers. But they state plainly an honest possibility of doing so, they turn the face of the writer squarely to her and his existence, the reason to be, as a writer, and the reason to be, as a responsible human, acting, like any other, within a social context.
  • Being here: in a particular time and place. That is the existential position with particular implications for literature.
  • Most imprisoned writers have been shut away for their activities as citizens striving for liberation against the oppression of the general society to which they belong. Others have been condemned by repressive regimes for serving society by writing as well as they can; for this aesthetic venture of ours becomes subversive when the shameful secrets of our times are explored deeply, with the artist's rebellious integrity to the state of being manifest in life around her or him; then the writer's themes and characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and distortions of that society as the life of the fisherman is determined by the power of the sea.
  • There is a paradox. In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state's indictment of treason, and the liberation forces' complaint of lack of blind commitment.
  • The writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats's beast slouching to be born.
  • The writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties, trusts the state of being, as it is revealed, to hold somewhere in its complexity filaments of the cord of truth, able to be bound together, here and there, in art: trusts the state of being to yield somewhere fragmentary phrases of truth, which is the final word of words, never changed by our stumbling efforts to spell it out and write it down, never changed by lies, by semantic sophistry, by the dirtying of the word for the purposes of racism, sexism, prejudice, domination, the glorification of destruction, the curses and the praise-songs.

Interview with Progressive Magazine (1992)

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  • 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. If something happens where I live, you see it tomorrow or perhaps even at the same time it is happening there. It's not "one world" in the sense that conflicts are resolved in the world. But we are more one world in that we know what is going on and are psychologically influenced by what goes on around us.
  • for country people, things are as they were. They are very remote, very poor, very dependent on the white farmers they work for. It's very difficult to organize them. There are still huge, huge problems to be tackled.
  • 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. They continue to love, to laugh, to get pleasure out of life.
  • This idea that revolutionaries are martyrs who go around looking gloomy and noble, this is a romantic idea for people who've never met anybody who's gone through the experiences.
  • to me this is what fiction is about; it asks questions, and it doesn't answer.
  • The real influence of the events in the Soviet Union was to spread a lot of unease and anxiety in the African National Congress, because the Soviet Union had been the only country, really, that had stood by us all those years. The West never lifted a finger or gave a cent to the African National Congress. America, England, Germany-everyone supported the South African government against the attempts of the African National Congress to bring about change.

The House Gun (1998)

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  • ...a swarthy man (Italian or jew?) with a scarred grin, and eyes, one dark-brilliant, one blurred blind, from whom radiant vitality comes impudently since he is gesticulating with a stump in place of one arm.
    • page 135
  • The purpose of life is to defend the body against the violence of pain.
    • page 13
  • That kind of act isn’t in the range of emotional control in which their son’s character was formed, or the contemporary ethic that men don’t own women. Therefore the act could not have been committed.
    • page 31
  • She would have drowned herself long ago if she had not met me. She doesn’t do that because, perhaps, I am more dreadful.
    • page 47
  • I have the feeling you’re in some way suspicious of me. You’re trying to … get me to explain, because I’m his mother. I ought to know, I should know why. And I’m his mother. I ought to know!
    • page 51
  • Whatever happens to him, whatever he has done … he can come to us. There’s nothing you cannot tell us. We’re always there for you. Always.
    • page 69
  • Duncan found her and took her to hospital. He brought her back to life. Literally. She owes her life to Duncan; or she blames him.
  • page 113
  • Discovery is not an end. Only a new mystery.
    • page 120
  • Two creatures caught in the headlights of catastrophe. Nothing between Duncan and the judge, passing sentence, but Motsamai and his confidence.
    • page 128
  • Oh dear, I’m sorry, Bra[brother] and Duncan remembers that “it was exactly the manner, the words, with which the man had announced the end of the months they had lived as lovers."
    • page 155
  • Had not been able to tell them anything that was leading him towards that Friday night when something terrible happened to him.
    • page 159
  • ...in whom self-control has been strongly established since childhood”, and that the evening of the murder was no exception.
    • page 200
  • ...cannot distinguish which Duncan is being described in truth.
    • p. 205
  • It is not in his nature. Never. I swear on my own life.
    • page 225
  • Disgust, a disintegration of everything.
    • page 211
  • I suddenly picked up the gun on the table. And then he was quiet.
    • p. 214
  • Whether or not harmful intention was premeditated, when the accused picked up the gun … was he in a state of automatism in which … there was total loss of control?
    • page 264-265
  • Bring death and life together.
    • page 294

The Pickup (2001)

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  • Clustered predators round a kill. It's a small car with a young woman inside it. The battery has failed and taxis, cars, minibuses, vans, motorcycles butt and challenge one another, reproach and curse her, a traffic mob mounting its own confusion. Get going. Stupid bloody woman. Idikazana lomlungu, le! She throws up hands, palms open, in surrender. They continue to jostle and blare their impatience. She gets out of her car and faces them. (first lines)
  • That night they made love, the kind of love-making that is another country, a country of its own, not yours or mine. (p144)
  • All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity. (p252)

Interview (2004)

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  • To me, writing, from the very beginning and right until this day, is a voyage of discovery. Of the mystery of life. I am one of those people who have no religious faith, I am an atheist. I believe there is only this life. But this life is so incredible.
  • The truth can only be pieced together from these different bits of knowledge, these different impressions, these different experiences. Goethe said: “You close your eyes and you dip your hand into your society and you bring up a little bit of the truth.” And that is the material of your writing.
  • I’m beginning now even to see it in my own books which are written from many different points of view, very different personae, first person as a man, a child, a woman, a young person, an older person, there is the sense, looking back, that you are really writing one book all your life. Because there is this voyage of discovery of life.
  • There is more truth in my fiction than in nonfiction. I think, subconsciously, [if] I am writing an article or talking to you, there is a certain amount of self-censorship going on. But in my fiction I am writing as if I were dead. I want to say it all. I want to say everything I know.
  • Do we ever live really in the present? I don’t think so, not entirely, do you?...There are always intrusions, sometimes welcome, sometimes not, from the past.
  • Writers don’t only listen, they also look. Though, indeed, they do listen. I started being an eavesdropper when I was a child, picking up unexplained little bits of conversation and imagining what led to that, what drama in that couple’s life, or what happened between that child and the parent when I overheard: “Stop that! You’re being very naughty.” You know, what does it all mean?

The Quotable Gordimer (2014)

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Yonder Mark (ed.)

  • As a writer, I'm a composite intelligence.
  • Television and newspapers show people's lives at a certain point. But novels tell you what happened after the riot, what happened when everybody went home.
  • Music has no limits of a life-span.
  • A desert is a place without expectation.
  • Death's the discarder.
  • Presence of death standing by makes a sacrament of tenuous relationships.

Quotes about Nadine Gordimer

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  • I will always be grateful for the presence in the world of Nadine Gordimer, who has delivered in literature a South Africa most of us could not have known without her.
    • Gail Caldwell used as blurb for Living in Hope and History (1999)
  • As a writer and as a human being, Nadine Gordimer responded with exemplary courage and creative energy to the great challenge of her times, the system of apartheid unjustly and heartlessly imposed on the South African people. Looking to the great realist novelists of the 19th century as models, she produced a body of work in which the South Africa of the late 20th century is indelibly recorded for all time.
  • Nadine Gordimer helped me see how fiction writing can illuminate reality
  • Because I have known so many different writers I have often thought about what generosity means in a writer. Sometimes, as with other people you meet, you can tell about a writer at once. Though I only met her on one occasion I knew immediately that Nadine Gordimer was an enormously likeable, generous and admirable person, and that is what I felt over many years reading her work.
  • Nadine Gordimer's work is endowed with an emotional genius so palpable one experiences it like a finger pressing steadily upon the prose.
  • The South African Jewish author Nadine Gordimer, who died on Sunday, July 13, at age 90, expressed an even-handed humanism throughout her literary career. This is far from the case for every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which Gordimer was accorded in 1991. Her scrupulous sense of fairness, which motivated her to oppose apartheid in her native land, also led her in 2008 to resist strident calls to boycott a Jerusalem writers’ conference. Instead, Gordimer accepted the invitation from Mishkenot Sha’ananim, determined to meet with Palestinians and Israelis because the literary festival was meant to “assert vitally that whatever violent, terrible, bitter and urgent chasms of conflict lie between peoples, the only solutions for peace and justice exist and must begin with both sides talking to one another…I shall do my utmost to uphold the principles and practice I have held, and still hold, at home in our country.”
  • In the course of an impressive four-decade-long career, the Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer has mapped and remapped the spiritual and psychological landscape of South Africa.
  • If ever a writer had a grasp of the umbilical connection between individual experience and historical possibility, it's Nadine Gordimer. The miracle of the Nobel prize is not only that someone got it who deserved it, but that the writer of our century who portrays most insistently how people wrestle with, resist and create political change was rewarded for her vision. An existentialist with an emphasis on both political commitment and efficacy, Gordimer is one of the few writers to depict the activist life. No surprise then to find her quoting Camus: "It is from the moment when I shall no longer be more than a writer that I shall cease to write." So far it's not a problem. A leftist publicly critical of communism since the early eighties, she named the challenge "to love truth enough, to pick up the blood-dirtied, shamed cause of the left, and attempt to recreate it in accordance with what it was meant to be, not what sixty-five years of human power-perversion have made of it." Comparisons with Doris Lessing, that other vast-minded leftist white woman writer from Southern Africa (Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia), seem inevitable; but Lessing left Africa and political vision. Gordimer stayed...Typical Gordimer to come out with the word, and with the truth of the character's fleeting but not trivial dilemma; typical to mix farts with colonialism. Nothing is off limits, but she's no cynic. A fierce moralist who insists on change, Gordimer summons us to our best selves: "There is no forgetting how we could live if only we could find the way. We must continue to be tormented by the ideal."
    • Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz Review of Jump and Other Stories (1991) in the Women's Review of Books (December, 1991) and The Issue is Power: Essays on Women, Jews, Violence and Resistance (1992)
  • Nadine Gordimer writes about black people with such astounding sensibilities and sensitivity-not patronizing, not romantic, just real. And Eudora Welty does the same thing. Lillian Hellman has done it. Now, we might categorize these women as geniuses of a certain sort, but if they can write about it, it means that it is possible. They didn't say, "Oh, my God, I can't write about black people"; it didn't stop them. There are white people who do respond that way though, assuming there's some huge barrier. But if you can relate to Beowolf and Jesus Christ when you read about them, it shouldn't be so difficult to relate to black literature.
    • 1980 interview in Conversations with Toni Morrison edited by Danille K. Taylor-Guthrie (1994)
  • "No one knows where the end of suffering will begin," writes Nadine Gordimer about the 1976 Soweto schoolchildren's uprising in her novel Burger's Daughter.
  • Politics, both large and small-scale, was Nadine's subject. Speaking the truth was her passion. She wrote about injustices not only in the bad old days, but in the new. She was a model of what an engaged writer can achieve, and that's what makes her my hero.
  • She remained true to her art but she also knew that the politics of struggle gave energy to her art; she was born on the other side of the colour line, but she built bridges across it. Speaking truth to power was the real power of her art. She may have passed on, but her 90 years among us were a blessing. Her presence and energy are forever alive in my memory. She remains a kindred spirit for, beyond the writing and activism, she was an unwavering supporter of writing in African languages. The quantity and quality of her literary output – from short stories and novels to essays – earned her many awards but, in the end, the biggest award for her was the affection and the respect she got from people of all races in South Africa and across the globe. Her written words will forever be an integral part of the collective memory of the world.
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