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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.

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
Mind
Brain
Flies
Disgraced
Word
Copy
Debased
Age
Copies
Primacy
Freedom
Bars
Pulp
Force
Advertising
Bending
Used
Basis
Psyche
Human
Bases
Persuasion
Humans
Remains
Washing

More quotes by Nadine Gordimer

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People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
Nadine Gordimer
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About the joys and the courage, I really don't know what other people think. I just know that I've never left Africa. I've lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.
Nadine Gordimer
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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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If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
Nadine Gordimer
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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
Nadine Gordimer
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Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
Nadine Gordimer
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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
Nadine Gordimer
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In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.
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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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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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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 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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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.
Nadine Gordimer
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I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
Nadine Gordimer
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Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
Nadine Gordimer