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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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Nadine Gordimer
Age: 90 †
Born: 1923
Born: November 20
Died: 2014
Died: July 13
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Scientific Editor
Short Story Writer
Writer
Government
Fellow
Wanted
Fellows
Nothing
Writers
South
Decided
Couldn
Banned
Television
Publicly
Speak
African

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Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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I'm a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can't see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.
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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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Communists are the last optimists.
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Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
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The facts are always less than what really happened.
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I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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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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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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Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
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Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.
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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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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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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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My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
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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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About the joys and the courage, I really don't know what other people think. I just know that I've never left Africa. I've lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.
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If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
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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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Books dont need batteries
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