Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
NADINE GORDIMERIn 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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 cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
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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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It’s easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.
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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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Writing is making sense of life.
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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 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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You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
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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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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 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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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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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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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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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.
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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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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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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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The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
NADINE GORDIMER