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.
NADINE GORDIMERSincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
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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.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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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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You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
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The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
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The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
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In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.
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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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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
NADINE GORDIMER