I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
NADINE GORDIMERThe 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
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I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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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.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
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A desert is a place without expectation.
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Communists are the last optimists.
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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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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.
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Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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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.
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Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.
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I don’t think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.
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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.
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It’s easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.
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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.
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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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Writing is making sense of life.
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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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