Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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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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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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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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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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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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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Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
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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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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
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Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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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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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.
NADINE GORDIMER