If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
NADINE GORDIMERHumans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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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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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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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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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that…you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.
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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.
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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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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.
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If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.
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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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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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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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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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It’s easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.
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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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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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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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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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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
NADINE GORDIMER