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.
NADINE GORDIMERIf I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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 making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.
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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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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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It’s absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It’s a betrayal of whatever talent you have.
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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
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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 Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can’t believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.
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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 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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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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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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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
NADINE GORDIMER