I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
NADINE GORDIMEROne can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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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.
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The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
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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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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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The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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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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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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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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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.
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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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it’s impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren’t taken into account because no one knows what they will be.
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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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Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one’s reactions, answerable to no one’s views.
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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
NADINE GORDIMER