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.
NADINE GORDIMERExile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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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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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
NADINE GORDIMER -
I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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 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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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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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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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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It’s absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It’s a betrayal of whatever talent you have.
NADINE GORDIMER