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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

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
White
Better
Firsts
First
Feel
African
Feels
Africa
Always
Second
Would
Stay

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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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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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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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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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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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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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All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
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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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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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Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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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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A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
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I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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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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I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.
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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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There's no tiling moral about beauty.
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As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.
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Books dont need batteries
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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.
Nadine Gordimer