The country of the tourist ...

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.
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 Nadine Gordimer

Quotes from the same author

Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
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 Nadine Gordimer
Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.
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 Nadine Gordimer
it's impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be.
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 Nadine Gordimer
Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
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 Nadine Gordimer
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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 Nadine Gordimer