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.
NADINE GORDIMERI have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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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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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.
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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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The 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.
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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
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Communists are the last optimists.
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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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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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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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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 a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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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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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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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
NADINE GORDIMER