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.
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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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 creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can’t believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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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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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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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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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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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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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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I don’t think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.
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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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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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Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
NADINE GORDIMER