Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
NADINE GORDIMERWhen 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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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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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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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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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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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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it’s impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren’t taken into account because no one knows what they will be.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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Books dont need batteries
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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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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
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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 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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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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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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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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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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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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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 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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If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
NADINE GORDIMER