In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.
NADINE GORDIMERPerhaps 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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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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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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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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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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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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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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Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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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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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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in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
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If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
NADINE GORDIMER