Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
NADINE GORDIMERSincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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It’s easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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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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Writing is making sense of life.
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Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.
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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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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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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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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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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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Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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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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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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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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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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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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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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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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