I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
NADINE GORDIMERIn a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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.
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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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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.
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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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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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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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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.
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I never talk about what I’m writing about currently, never. It’s private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.
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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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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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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can’t believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.
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From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
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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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You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.
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The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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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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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER