Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
NADINE GORDIMERI 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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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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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.
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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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If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
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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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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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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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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.
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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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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
NADINE GORDIMER