In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
NADINE GORDIMERPerhaps 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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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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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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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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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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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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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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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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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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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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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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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
NADINE GORDIMER