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.
NADINE GORDIMERIf 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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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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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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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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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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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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Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one’s reactions, answerable to no one’s views.
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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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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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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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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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
NADINE GORDIMER