Marlene van Niekerk quotes
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“Nobody can be so beautiful from the outside and so hollow from inside. Not even in a third-rate novel.”
-- Marlene van Niekerk -
“...a butterfly is like the soul of a person, it dries out in captivity.”
-- Marlene van Niekerk -
“We all have to do things in this life that we don't like.”
-- Marlene van Niekerk -
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“In a state of pseudo-death you restore your substance.”
-- Marlene van Niekerk -
“Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you have read Thomas Mann in any case. Learn by copying, sentence by sentence some of the masters. Copy Coetzee's or Sebald's sentences and see what happens to your story. Consider creative non-fiction if you want to stay in South Africa. It might be the way to go. Never neglect back and hamstring exercises, otherwise you won't be able to write your novel. One needs one's buttocks to think.”
-- Marlene van Niekerk -
“Everything is important. To the smallest insect, even the mouldering tree, the deepest stone in the drift.”
-- Marlene van Niekerk
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Source : A. Bartlett Giamatti (1981). “The University and the Public Interest”, Atheneum Books
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“It took me six novels before I felt confident of my voice as a writer,”
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“Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.”
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