As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
NADINE GORDIMERAny writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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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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a writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing – he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.
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About the joys and the courage, I really don’t know what other people think. I just know that I’ve never left Africa. I’ve lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.
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Writing is making sense of life.
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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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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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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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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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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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A desert is a place without expectation.
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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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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Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.
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I don’t think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.
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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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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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Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
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You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
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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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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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From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER