It’s absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It’s a betrayal of whatever talent you have.
NADINE GORDIMERa 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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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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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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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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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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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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in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
NADINE GORDIMER