Nadine Gordimer Quotes

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

... what it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers...

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

Communists are the last optimists.

I'm an atheist. I wouldn't even call myself an agnostic. I am an atheist.

The creative act is not pure.

I don't cry. Unfortunately, I seem rather short of tears, so my sorrows have to stay inside me.

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

Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing eac...

I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

How did I find out? I was deceiving him.

Death is really the mystery of life, isn't it?

I am an African. I am white. I, in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earn...

But a human being, she, she, cannot simply exist; she is a hurricane, every thought bending and cros...

To discover the exact location of a 'thing' is a simple matter of factual research. To discover the ...

You don’t have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense - there’s a difference between...

You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you g...

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears ...

They say (she had read somewhere) that no one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, w...

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

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

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

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

The facts are always less than what really happened.

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and ...