I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
NADINE GORDIMERWriting is making sense of life.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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Writing is making sense of life.
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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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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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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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A desert is a place without expectation.
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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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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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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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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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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.
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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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in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
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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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a writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing – he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.
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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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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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Communists are the last optimists.
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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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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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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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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
NADINE GORDIMER