Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.
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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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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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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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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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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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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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.
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Communists are the last optimists.
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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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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER