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

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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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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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Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
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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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Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
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in writing, sex doesn't matter it's the writing that matters.
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I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
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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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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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Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
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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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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? 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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Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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Music has no limits of a life-span.
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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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Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
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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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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