Nadine Gordimer Quotes

The imagination and the place that dreams come from is so huge and so important. I'm trying to write about the real world, in that I'm trying to write about whatever it is the experience that makes us human, the things that we have in common.

I remember this one time I had a dream about me writing a screenplay, and when I woke up, you know those dreams that feel so real, but I woke up and I was like, 'Oh my god I have this amazing screenplay I need to write down as soon as I wake up' and then I woke up and I was like what the heck was I dreaming of?

Writing, when it works, one needs to access whatever it is that creates dreams.

In terms of the symbolism, I think that if you do it right, writing is a bit like dreaming.

Dreams are more real than reality itself, they're closer to the self.

As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing?

The things that I write are autobiographical in a surreal sense, like when you have a dream and you go to the doctor's office, but then you turn around and it's actually your childhood home and the doctor has turned into Ryan Reynolds.

A word only writes its night and rides its dream.

Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?

Occasionally, I'll dream I'm in the factory. That will help me write. Not creatively, but more like a prod. I don't want to go back there.

Writing was my real life and I was more at home with the people of my imagination than with the best I met in the objective world.

Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still-are.

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.

If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain.

When you dream, all the scenery, characters, events, perils, and outcomes are built from your own consciousness, the darks and oppressions as well as the delights. Same with the world awake, though it takes you longer to build it.

I very much hope that when my wife reads my writings so she reads it as if she is a character and not the real one. Sometimes she takes it too personally.

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . . The edit.

A dream is the mind's way of answering a question it hasn't yet figured out how to ask.

When you realize the writers start writing to who you are, you're basically reading reviews of yourself. And then it becomes this cyclical nightmare where I feel like I need to play into it, then I find myself acting like the character in real life.

When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.

I'm never lonely when I'm writing, because you live with the characters that are so alive in your mind. And you really see them and know them and get to be friends with them.

I'm definitely antiscientist because I feel that science represents a conspiracy to impose as the real and only universe, the universe of scientists themselves - they're reality-addicts, they've got to have things so real so they can get their hands on it.

I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me.

All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.

For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.