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.
NADINE GORDIMERThe gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind’s eye only, fade out in sand.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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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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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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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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Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.
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Communists are the last optimists.
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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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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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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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in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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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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If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
NADINE GORDIMER