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.
NADINE GORDIMERThe function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? 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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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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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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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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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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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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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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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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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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
NADINE GORDIMER