Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
NADINE GORDIMERMostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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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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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
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Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
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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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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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Any 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.
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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 function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
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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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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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I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
NADINE GORDIMER