Writing is making sense of life.
NADINE GORDIMERI 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.
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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.
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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that…you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.
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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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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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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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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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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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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.
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Communists are the last optimists.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER