If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.
NADINE GORDIMERSuccess sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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a writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing – he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.
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Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
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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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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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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.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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Writing is making sense of life.
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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.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
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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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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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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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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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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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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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Communists are the last optimists.
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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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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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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
NADINE GORDIMER