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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 -
I never talk about what I'm writing about currently, never. It's private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer -
The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
Nadine Gordimer -
Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
Nadine Gordimer -
Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
Nadine Gordimer -
In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
Nadine Gordimer -
what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.
Nadine Gordimer
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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.
Nadine Gordimer -
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.
Nadine Gordimer -
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 -
It's absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It's a betrayal of whatever talent you have.
Nadine Gordimer -
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 -
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