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.
NADINE GORDIMERVery often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that…you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Communists are the last optimists.
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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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Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.
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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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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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I never talk about what I’m writing about currently, never. It’s private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.
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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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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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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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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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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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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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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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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
NADINE GORDIMER