a writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing – he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.
NADINE GORDIMERCommunists are the last optimists.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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It’s easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.
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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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Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
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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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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
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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.
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Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
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People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
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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 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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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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There’s no tiling moral about beauty.
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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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A desert is a place without expectation.
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Books dont need batteries
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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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In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
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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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Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
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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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Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.
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It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
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The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
NADINE GORDIMER