176 Quotes by Nadine Gordimer

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.

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.

It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.

Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature

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.

The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.

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 is making sense of life.

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.