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 GORDIMERDisaster is private, in its way, as love is.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
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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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You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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Communists are the last optimists.
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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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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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I never talk about what I’m writing about currently, never. It’s private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.
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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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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.
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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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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.
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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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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
NADINE GORDIMER