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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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There's no tiling moral about beauty.
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From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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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
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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.
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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.
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The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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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.
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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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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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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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Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy 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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in writing, sex doesn't matter it's the writing that matters.
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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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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 gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.
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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.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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.
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Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
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