Quotes from Nadine Gordimer

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

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.

Music has no limits of a life-span.

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

Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature

You can't be afraid to do good in case evil results.

A desert is a place without expectation.

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

Writing is making sense of life.

In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.

Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.

Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.

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.

Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.

The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.

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.

Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that...you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.

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

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.

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

Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.