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Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

— Nadine Gordimer

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Source, in full

Interview with Jannika Hurwitt, published in Paris Review, 88 (Summer 1983) 82–127; reprinted in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Sixth Series (1984) (the interview took place in two parts: fall 1979/spring 1980)

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Writing

More quotes by Nadine Gordimer

Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.

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.

The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

All Nadine Gordimer quotes →

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The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

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Three sleepless nights I passed in sounding on,
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William Wordsworth Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed (1919)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Nadine Gordimer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.