Telling Times: writing and living

Telling Times: writing and living (1954) by Nadine Gordimer Telling Times collects together all her non-fiction for the first time, spanning more than half a century, from the twilight of colonial rule in South Africa, to the long, brutal fight to overthrow South Africa's apartheid regime and to her leadership role over the last 20 years in confronting the dangers of AIDS, globalisation, and ethnic violence. The range of this book is staggering, from Gordimer's first piece in The New Yorker in 1954, in which she autobiographically traces her emergence as a brilliant, young writer in a racist country, to her pioneering role in recognising the greatest African and European writers of her generation, to her truly, courageous stance in supporting Nelson Mandela and other members of the ANC during their years of imprisonment. Given that Gordimer will never write an autobiography, Telling Times is an important document of twentieth-century social and political history, told through the voice of one of its greatest literary figures.

Quotes

 * The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
 * pg 121
 * A desert is a place without expectation.
 * page 313
 * There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
 * Page 418
 * The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
 * Page 409
 * Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
 * Page 357
 * Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.
 * Page 277
 * Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
 * Page 425
 * Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
 * Page 119
 * Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
 * Page 409
 * Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
 * Page 411
 * The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.
 * Page 132