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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.

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
Sense
Light
Make
Time
Life
Changes
Like
Function
Mystery

More quotes by Nadine Gordimer

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People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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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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You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.
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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.
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I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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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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There's no tiling moral about beauty.
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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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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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Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that...you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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It's easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.
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The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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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I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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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Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
Nadine Gordimer