One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
NADINE GORDIMERYour 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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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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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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A desert is a place without expectation.
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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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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
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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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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 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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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
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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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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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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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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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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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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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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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I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.
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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER