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.
NADINE GORDIMERAll worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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It’s absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It’s a betrayal of whatever talent you have.
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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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About the joys and the courage, I really don’t know what other people think. I just know that I’ve never left Africa. I’ve lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.
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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 decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn’t speak publicly.
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In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
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Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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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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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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Writing is making sense of life.
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The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.
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I never talk about what I’m writing about currently, never. It’s private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.
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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
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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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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one’s reactions, answerable to no one’s views.
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If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
NADINE GORDIMER