As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
NADINE GORDIMERAll worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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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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I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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Writing is making sense of life.
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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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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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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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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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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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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
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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.
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About the joys and the courage, I really don’t know what other people think. I just know that I’ve never left Africa. I’ve lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.
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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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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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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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Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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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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It’s absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It’s a betrayal of whatever talent you have.
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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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The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
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