Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
NADINE GORDIMER
If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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.
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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Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
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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 decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn’t speak publicly.
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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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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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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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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
NADINE GORDIMER