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.
NADINE GORDIMERIf 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? 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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The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
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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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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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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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In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
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If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
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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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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.
NADINE GORDIMER