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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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Nadine Gordimer
Age: 90 †
Born: 1923
Born: November 20
Died: 2014
Died: July 13
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Scientific Editor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Writer
Evidences
Realizing
Sociological
Loses
Sociology
Creative
Eden
Read
Writes
History
Evidence
Comes
Realize
Extracts
Writing
Pure
Answerable

More quotes by Nadine Gordimer

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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 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.
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You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.
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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.
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People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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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.
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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
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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.
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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.
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
Nadine Gordimer
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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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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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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I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.
Nadine Gordimer