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.
NADINE GORDIMERThe tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Books dont need batteries
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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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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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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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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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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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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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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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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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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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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
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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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Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.
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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
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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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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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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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I don’t think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.
NADINE GORDIMER