Quotes by Nadine Gordimer

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

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

“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 wha...”

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

“The creative act is not pure.”

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

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

“They say (she had read somewhere) that no one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space--atoms infinitely minute, beyond conception of existence, are up there for...”

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

“To discover the exact location of a 'thing' is a simple matter of factual research. To discover the exact location of a person: where to locate the self?”

“You dont have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense - theres a difference between thinking to oneself and thinking as a form of conversation, even if there are no answers.”

“But a human being, she, she, cannot simply exist; she is a hurricane, every thought bending and crossing its coherence inside her, nothing will let her be, not for a moment. Every emotion, every th...”

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

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

“Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the ...”

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

“You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.”

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

“I am an African. I am white. I, in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right.”

“Communists are the last optimists.”