Quotes from Nadine Gordimer

It's easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.

But a human being, she, she, cannot simply exist; she is a hurricane, every thought bending and crossing its coherence inside her, nothing will let her be, not for a moment. Every emotion, every thought, is invaded by another.

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

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity

The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new.

you like to have some cup of tea?-July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind.

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.

A desert is a place without expectation.

If you ask, 'What happens when we die? Why do we die?' you are asking, 'Why do we live?

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

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

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

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.

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

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

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.

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

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

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

She filled her house with blacks, and white parsons who went around preaching Jesus was a revolutionary, and then when the police walked in she was surprised.

That was one of the things she held against missionaries: how they stressed Christ's submission to humiliation, and so had conditioned the people of Africa to humiliation by the white man.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?