You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
NADINE GORDIMERIn various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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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I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
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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 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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In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
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Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
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I never talk about what I’m writing about currently, never. It’s private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.
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The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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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.
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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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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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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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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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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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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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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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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.
NADINE GORDIMER -
There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
NADINE GORDIMER