Quotes by Nadine Gordimer

A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
– Nadine Gordimer
Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.
– 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
Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
– Nadine Gordimer
If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
– Nadine Gordimer
Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
– 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 country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
– 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 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 primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
– 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