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.
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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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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Perhaps 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.
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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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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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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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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
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I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn’t speak publicly.
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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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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When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.
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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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I don’t think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.
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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER