From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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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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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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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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It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
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You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
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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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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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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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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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The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
NADINE GORDIMER