Quotes by Nadine Gordimer

“... what it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers' days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by t...”

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

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

“How did I find out? I was deceiving him.”

“The facts are always less than what really happened.”

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

“A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.”

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

“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 don’t have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense - there’s 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 truth isn't always beauty but the hunger for it is.”

“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.”

“I opened the telegram and said, He's dead — and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say.”

“Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself — who wouldn’t make the world over if it were to be as easy as that.”

“I like the idea of a literary patchwork, novel by novel, poem by poem, by different writers, mapping out an era, 'a continent' more and more thoroughly. No one writer can do it. (1979)”

“I think that the decision to be sincere is an artistic one.”

“Novelists and short-story writers provide implicitly a critique of their society…A good writer can't help revealing the truth that is in his society and by that token there is a political implicati...”

“In countries like Czechoslovakia, like South Africa, like Argentina, guilt by association is a fact and therefore the friendships you form can be a political act. This circumstance, way of life, is...”

“I think that as long as those of us in South Africa who are articulate are asked to go abroad, and we know we are going to be interviewed, we cannot refuse. There are so many people in South Africa...”