I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
NADINE GORDIMERMostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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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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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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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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You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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Communists are the last optimists.
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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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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one’s reactions, answerable to no one’s views.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER