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.
NADINE GORDIMERThe solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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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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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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A desert is a place without expectation.
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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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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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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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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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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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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 gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind’s eye only, fade out in sand.
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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
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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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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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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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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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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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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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In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
NADINE GORDIMER