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.
NADINE GORDIMERLearning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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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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About the joys and the courage, I really don’t know what other people think. I just know that I’ve never left Africa. I’ve lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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Writing is making sense of life.
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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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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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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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In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
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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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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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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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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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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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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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A desert is a place without expectation.
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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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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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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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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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Books dont need batteries
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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 GORDIMER