Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
NADINE GORDIMERWriting is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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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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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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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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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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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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When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.
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I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
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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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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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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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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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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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it’s impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren’t taken into account because no one knows what they will be.
NADINE GORDIMER






