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 GORDIMERin writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
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Writing is making sense of life.
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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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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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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.
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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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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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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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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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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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
NADINE GORDIMER