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 GORDIMERNothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
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A desert is a place without expectation.
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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 Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can’t believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.
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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.
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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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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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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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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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In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
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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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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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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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If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.
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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
NADINE GORDIMER