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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.

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
Value
Nuisance
Known
Overseas
Values
Inform
Become
Africa
Country
Helped
Life
Writers
Like
South
People
Certainly

More quotes by Nadine Gordimer

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Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
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Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.
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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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And this indifference is still very much present in modern South Africa. Just listen to Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer - a representative of the British elite in this country: Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation.
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The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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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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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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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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There's no tiling moral about beauty.
Nadine Gordimer
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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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I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
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Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn't speak publicly.
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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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer