If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
NADINE GORDIMERThe 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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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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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
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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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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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a writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing – he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.
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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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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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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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From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER