People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
NADINE GORDIMERThe facts are always less than what really happened.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.
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When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.
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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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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.
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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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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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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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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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In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
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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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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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From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
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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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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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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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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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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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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
NADINE GORDIMER