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 GORDIMERIt was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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 -
Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
NADINE GORDIMER -
If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
NADINE GORDIMER -
The facts are always less than what really happened.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER






