I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
NADINE GORDIMERSuccess sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind’s eye only, fade out in sand.
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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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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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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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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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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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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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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I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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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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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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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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Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that…you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.
NADINE GORDIMER