There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
NADINE GORDIMERLearning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one’s reactions, answerable to no one’s views.
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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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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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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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Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
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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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Writing is making sense of life.
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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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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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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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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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
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If 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.
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I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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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.
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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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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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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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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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I never talk about what I’m writing about currently, never. It’s private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.
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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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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
NADINE GORDIMER