when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
NADINE GORDIMERI couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that…you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.
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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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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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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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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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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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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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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
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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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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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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.
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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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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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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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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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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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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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Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
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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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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
NADINE GORDIMER