The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
NADINE GORDIMERCan 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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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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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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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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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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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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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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If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.
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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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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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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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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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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
NADINE GORDIMER