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 GORDIMERCan 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
NADINE GORDIMER -
When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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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In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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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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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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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
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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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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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I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
NADINE GORDIMER