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 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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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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In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
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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.
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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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It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
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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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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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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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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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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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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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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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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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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Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.
NADINE GORDIMER