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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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Nadine Gordimer
Age: 90 †
Born: 1923
Born: November 20
Died: 2014
Died: July 13
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Scientific Editor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Way
Sent
Life
Falling
Surface
South
Learning
Fall
Write
Writing
African

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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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The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
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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.
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The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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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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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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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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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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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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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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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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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.
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There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
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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.
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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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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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