Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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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 creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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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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Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
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The 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.
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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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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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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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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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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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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 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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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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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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The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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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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Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one’s reactions, answerable to no one’s views.
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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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I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
NADINE GORDIMER