People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
NADINE GORDIMERThere is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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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Communists are the last optimists.
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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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If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.
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You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
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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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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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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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Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
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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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In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.
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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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Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that…you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.
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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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when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.
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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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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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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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Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
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I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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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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From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
NADINE GORDIMER