What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there’s another force from inside battling to make us something else.
NADINE GORDIMERAll worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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.
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.
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The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can’t believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.
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Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.
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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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Writing is making sense of life.
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Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
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Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
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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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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
NADINE GORDIMER