The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
NADINE GORDIMERDisaster is private, in its way, as love is.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there’s another force from inside battling to make us something else.
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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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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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Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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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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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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Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.
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Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
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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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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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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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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
NADINE GORDIMER






