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 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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The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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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.
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I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.
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The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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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.
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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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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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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER