The 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.
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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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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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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A desert is a place without expectation.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
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The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
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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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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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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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From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
NADINE GORDIMER