Nadine Gordimer

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The creative act is not pure.”

“A desert is a place without expectation.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

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

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

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

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

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

“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 forever, from the whole world, from all time.”

“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.”