The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
NADINE GORDIMERIf one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.
More Nadine Gordimer Quotes
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I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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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All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
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I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
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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.
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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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Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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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.
NADINE GORDIMER -
Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
NADINE GORDIMER -
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.
NADINE GORDIMER