Nadine Gordimer quotes

A desert is a place without expectation. (Nadine Gordimer)
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
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. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Communists are the last optimists. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
The facts are always less than what really happened. View quote
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. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next. (Nadine Gordimer)
Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
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. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Music has no limits of a life-span. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
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. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
My answer is: Recognize yourself in others. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. (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. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder. View quote
Nadine Gordimer
I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that. View quote
Nadine Gordimer