Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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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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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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A desert is a place without expectation.
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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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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
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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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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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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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When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.
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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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If 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.
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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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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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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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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.
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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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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
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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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The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
NADINE GORDIMER