Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
NADINE GORDIMERPeople give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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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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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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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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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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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.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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I never talk about what I’m writing about currently, never. It’s private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.
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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
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The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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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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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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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.
NADINE GORDIMER