Nadine Gordimer Quotes (28 Quotes)

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

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.

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.

She filled her house with blacks, and white parsons who went around preaching Jesus was a revolutionary, and then when the police walked in she was surprised

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

He's a colleague and a friend, and it's also a wonderful thing that the Nobel Prize has come to South Africa again,

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

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors

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.

Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.

A desert is a place without expectation.

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

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

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

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.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

In a democracy -- even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-Tlitist 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

Ernest Hemingway was in love with Africa and as with others in such a state of emotion ... he constructed for himself, according to his needs and desires, something that had little relation to the reality of the continent,

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

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

If people would forget about utopia When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.

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

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

That was one of the things she held against missionaries how they stressed Christ's submission to humiliation, and so had conditioned the people of Africa to humiliation by the white man.

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.