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.
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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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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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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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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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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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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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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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Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.
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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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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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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can’t believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.
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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER