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.
NADINE GORDIMERKeenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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.
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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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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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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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it’s impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren’t taken into account because no one knows what they will be.
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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.
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In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.
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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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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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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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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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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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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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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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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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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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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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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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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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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
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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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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
NADINE GORDIMER