Nadine Gordimer
Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.Collection: Beauty
People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.Collection: Birthday
A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.Collection: Fear
There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
A desert is a place without expectation.
Time is change; we measure its passing by how much things alter.
Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.
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.
Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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.
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.
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.
The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.Collection: Inspirational
A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.Collection: Truly Living
My answer is: Recognize yourself in othersCollection: Answers
Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.Collection: Aging
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.Collection: Writing
I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.Collection: Home
Books dont need batteriesCollection: Book
Writing is making sense of life.Collection: Writing
Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.Collection: Bleach
You can't be afraid to do good in case evil results.Collection: Evil
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.Collection: Writing
Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.Collection: Hearing
Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.Collection: Fades
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.Collection: Book
Newspapers are horror happening to other people.Collection: People
Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.Collection: Art
The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.Collection: Tension
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.Collection: Law
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.Collection: Air
Everyone ends up moving alone towards the selfCollection: Moving
Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.Collection: Ideas
The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.Collection: Creativity
Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.Collection: Literature
Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Freedom Of Speech
Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.Collection: White
Music has no limits of a life-span.Collection: Limits
The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.Collection: Zoos
Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human natureCollection: Human Nature
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.Collection: Betrayal
Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.Collection: Love Is
You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.Collection: Compassion
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.Collection: Country
All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.Collection: Writing
In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era.Collection: Eras