Top 108 Quotes & Sayings by Nadine Gordimer

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.

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

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

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.

A desert is a place without expectation.

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.

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

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

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

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

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.

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

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

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

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.

In a democracy - even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-?litist one - the greatest veneration one can show the rule of law is to keep a watch on it, and to reserve the right to judge unjust laws and the subversion of the function of the law by the power of the state. That vigilance is the most important proof of respect for the law.

Music has no limits of a life-span.

Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.

My answer is: Recognize yourself in others

Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.

Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.

Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.

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.

Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.

Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.

Writing is always a voyage of discovery.

Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self

All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.

Newspapers are horror happening to other people.

I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.

Writing is making sense of life.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

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.

The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

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.

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

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.

a writer doesn't only need the time when he's actually writing - he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.

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

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.

In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.

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.

I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.

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

Books dont need batteries

Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature

When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.

I'm a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can't see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.

It's easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

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.

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

Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.