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.
NADINE GORDIMERYou can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Communists are the last optimists.
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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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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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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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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
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Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
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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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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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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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Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER