The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
NADINE GORDIMERPerhaps 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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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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A desert is a place without expectation.
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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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I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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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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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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a writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing – he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.
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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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It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
NADINE GORDIMER