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 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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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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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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I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn’t speak publicly.
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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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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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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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Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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a writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing – he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.
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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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The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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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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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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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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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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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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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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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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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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Communists are the last optimists.
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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
NADINE GORDIMER