Nadine Gordimer's Quotes

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

A desert is a place without expectation.

From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.

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

Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.

A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.

I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

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.

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

Time is change; we measure its passing by how much things alter.

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

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.