Nadine Gordimer Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Writing, Made, Whole Life

  Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin, Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990). “Conversations with Nadine Gordimer”, p.139, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Writing is making sense of life.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Writing, Make Sense

  Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin, Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990). “Conversations with Nadine Gordimer”, p.139, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• 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.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Writing, Political, Purpose

• 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

  Writing, Solitude, Madness

  Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin, Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990). “Conversations with Nadine Gordimer”, p.156, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• 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.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Book, Writing, Different

• 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

  Writing, Eden, Creative

  "The Tanner Lectures on Human Values". Book edited by Sterling McMurrin, 1980.

• 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.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Writing, Character, Artist

  Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin, Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990). “Conversations with Nadine Gordimer”, p.140, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Writing, Fiction, Truthful

  Nadine Gordimer (2012). “Living in Hope and History”, p.199, A&C Black

• All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Writing, Vision, Individual

• 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.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Beautiful, Writing, Light

  Nadine Gordimer (2012). “Living in Hope and History”, p.199, A&C Black

• 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

  New York, Writing, Sky

• in writing, sex doesn't matter; it's the writing that matters.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Sex, Writing, Matter

  Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin, Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990). “Conversations with Nadine Gordimer”, p.154, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• 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

  Writing, Needs, Made

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin, Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990). “Conversations with Nadine Gordimer”, p.155, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• I believe - I know (there are not many things I should care to dogmatize about, on the subject of writing) that writers need solitude, and seek alienation of a kind every day of their working lives. (And remember, they are not even aware when and when not they are working.) ... The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Believe, Writing, Solitude

  Nadine Gordimer (1983). “Selected Stories”, Viking Press

• If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Real, Writing, Past

  Nadine Gordimer (2012). “Loot”, p.72, Bloomsbury Publishing

• 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.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Art, Writing, Understanding

  Nadine Gordimer (2012). “Living in Hope and History”, p.199, A&C Black

• 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

  Betrayal, Writing, Thinking

• The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Drama, Writing, Mean

  "Nadine Gordimer on dividing fact from fiction" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. November 8, 2010.

• I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Jealous, Writing, Privacy

  Nadine Gordimer (1995). “Writing and Being”, p.115, Harvard University Press

• Writing is always a voyage of discovery.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Writing, Discovery, Voyages

• 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

  Writing, Views, Way

  "'Fresh Air' Remembers South African Writer Nadine Gordimer". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. July 14, 2014.

• Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Fall, Writing, Way

  Nadine Gordimer (2012). “Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008”, p.119, A&C Black

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