Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
NADINE GORDIMERI’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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
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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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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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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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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.
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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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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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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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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.
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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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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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Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
NADINE GORDIMER