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

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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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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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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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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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Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.
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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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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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From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
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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 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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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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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 couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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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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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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I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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