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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.

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
Already
Dead
Views
Write
Best
Answerable
Writing
Reactions
Way
Afraid
Perhaps

More quotes by 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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There's no tiling moral about beauty.
Nadine Gordimer
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Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.
Nadine Gordimer
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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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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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I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn't speak publicly.
Nadine Gordimer
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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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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The facts are always less than what really happened.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
Nadine Gordimer
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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
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
Nadine Gordimer
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
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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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
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All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
Nadine Gordimer