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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.

Nadine Gordimer

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Nadine Gordimer
Age: 90 †
Born: 1923
Born: November 20
Died: 2014
Died: July 13
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Scientific Editor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Sincerity
Oneself
Idea
Ideas
Never

More quotes by Nadine Gordimer

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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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If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa
Nadine Gordimer
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Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
Nadine Gordimer
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And this indifference is still very much present in modern South Africa. Just listen to Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer - a representative of the British elite in this country: Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation.
Nadine Gordimer
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I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.
Nadine Gordimer
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The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can't believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
Nadine Gordimer
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The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.
Nadine Gordimer
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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
Nadine Gordimer
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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
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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
Nadine Gordimer
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What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.
Nadine Gordimer
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You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.
Nadine Gordimer
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer