Communists are the last optimists.
NADINE GORDIMERTime is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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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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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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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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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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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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Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one’s reactions, answerable to no one’s views.
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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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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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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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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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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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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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The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
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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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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.
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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.
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Writing is making sense of life.
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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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When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.
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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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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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The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
NADINE GORDIMER