A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
NADINE GORDIMERIt’s absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It’s a betrayal of whatever talent you have.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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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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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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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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it’s impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren’t taken into account because no one knows what they will be.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.
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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
NADINE GORDIMER -
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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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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I 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.
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Communists are the last optimists.
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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
NADINE GORDIMER