The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
NADINE GORDIMERThe caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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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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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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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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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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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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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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If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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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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One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
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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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If 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.
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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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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
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I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
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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.
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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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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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The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
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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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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER