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.
NADINE GORDIMERPeople give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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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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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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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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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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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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If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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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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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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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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Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER