Quotes from Nadine Gordimer

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

with an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion.

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.

Music has no limits of a life-span.

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

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

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

Death is really the mystery of life, isn't it?

what it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers' days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by the struggle against the numbing of cold.

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.

How did I find out? I was deceiving him.