The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
NADINE GORDIMERI have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
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Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
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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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I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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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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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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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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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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.
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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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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER