There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
NADINE GORDIMERThe 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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 GORDIMER -
Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? 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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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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
NADINE GORDIMER -
All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Writing is making sense of life.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER