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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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Nadine Gordimer
Age: 90 †
Born: 1923
Born: November 20
Died: 2014
Died: July 13
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Scientific Editor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Privacy
Shall
Write
Writing
Much
Never
Autobiography
Jealous

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The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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There's no tiling moral about beauty.
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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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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.
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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.
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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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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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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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The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
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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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If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had ever heard of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz? He is not politically involved. Octavio Paz is a great poet, also not politically involved. The Nobel Prize is for literature, for the quality of work over the years.
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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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Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.
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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People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
Nadine Gordimer
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All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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.
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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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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