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.
NADINE GORDIMERAll worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
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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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Communists are the last optimists.
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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.
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Writing is making sense of life.
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The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
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I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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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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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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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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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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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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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.
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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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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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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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.
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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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From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
NADINE GORDIMER