Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimerwas a South African writer, political activist and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was recognized as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity"...
NationalitySouth African
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 November 1923
art writing understanding
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. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag.
jealous writing privacy
I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.
beautiful writing light
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.
writing eden creative
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.
writing fiction truthful
Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
writing solitude madness
The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
book writing different
Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.
writing make-sense
Writing is making sense of life.
writing vision individual
All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
writing political purpose
What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.
writing made whole-life
Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.
writing character thinking
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.
sex writing matter
in writing, sex doesn't matter; it's the writing that matters.
fall writing way
Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.