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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

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

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

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

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.

A desert is a place without expectation.

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

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

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.

You’ve got to put your life on the line to show that you are part of the struggle.

Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next.

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn't speak publicly.

it's impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be.

In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era.

Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.

I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.

If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.