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 GORDIMERWriters themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
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.
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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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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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it’s impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren’t taken into account because no one knows what they will be.
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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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Books dont need batteries
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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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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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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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I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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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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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER






