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

A desert is a place without expectation.
Nadine Gordimer

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.
Nadine Gordimer

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

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

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

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.
Nadine Gordimer

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

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
Nadine Gordimer

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.
Nadine Gordimer

The facts are always less than what really happened.
Nadine Gordimer

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.
Nadine Gordimer

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

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
Nadine Gordimer

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

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

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