Top 15 Nadine Gordimer Quotes

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

I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.

I'm a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can't see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.

Books don't need batteries.

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.

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.

My answer is: Recognize yourself in others

Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

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.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

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