I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.
NADINE GORDIMERLiterature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
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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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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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
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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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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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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.
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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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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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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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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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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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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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From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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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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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
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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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The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
NADINE GORDIMER