Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
NADINE GORDIMERThe country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Perhaps 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.
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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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I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
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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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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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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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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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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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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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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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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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.
NADINE GORDIMER