I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
NADINE GORDIMERSeptember 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.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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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I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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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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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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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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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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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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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
NADINE GORDIMER