a 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.
NADINE GORDIMERYour whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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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Books dont need batteries
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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 fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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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 -
Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
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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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Writing is making sense of life.
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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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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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
NADINE GORDIMER