I don’t think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.
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 primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
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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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I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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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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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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In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.
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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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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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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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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
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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.
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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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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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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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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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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
NADINE GORDIMER