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 GORDIMERKeenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? 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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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
NADINE GORDIMER -
My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
NADINE GORDIMER -
I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn’t speak publicly.
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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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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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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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
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Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.
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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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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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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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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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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
NADINE GORDIMER