176 Quotes by Nadine Gordimer

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.

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.

The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.

I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.

Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.

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.

The desert. No seasons of bloom and decay. Just the endless turn of night and day. Out of time: and she is gazing- not over it, taken into it, for it has no measure of space, features that mark distance from here to there. In a film of haze there is no horizon, the pallor of sand, pink-traced, lilac-luminous with its own colour of faint light, has no demarcation from land to air. Sky-haze is indistinguishable from sand-haze. All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity.

Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self.

The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.