Top 90 Nadine Gordimer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Writing is always a voyage of discovery.”

— Nadine Gordimer

2. “Writing is making sense of life.”

— Nadine Gordimer

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

— Nadine Gordimer

4. “A desert is a place without expectation.”

— Nadine Gordimer

5. “Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self.”

— Nadine Gordimer

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

— Nadine Gordimer

7. “The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”

— Nadine Gordimer

8. “Books don’t need batteries.”

— Nadine Gordimer

9. “Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.”

— Nadine Gordimer

10. “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.”

— Nadine Gordimer

11. “The facts are always less than what really happened.”

— Nadine Gordimer

12. “There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.”

— Nadine Gordimer

13. “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.”

— Nadine Gordimer

14. “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.”

— Nadine Gordimer

15. “Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.”

— Nadine Gordimer

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

— Nadine Gordimer

17. “Music has no limits of a life-span.”

— Nadine Gordimer

18. “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

19. “I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.”

— Nadine Gordimer

20. “A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.”

— Nadine Gordimer

21. “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

22. “Equality was not freedom, it had only been the mistaken yearning to become like the people of the town. And who wanted to become like the very ones feared and hated? Envy was not freedom.”

— Nadine Gordimer

23. “Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.”

— Nadine Gordimer

24. “I don’t think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.”

— Nadine Gordimer

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

— Nadine Gordimer

26. “Newspapers are horror happening to other people.”

— Nadine Gordimer

27. “In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.”

— Nadine Gordimer

28. “I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.”

— Nadine Gordimer

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

— Nadine Gordimer

30. “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.”

— Nadine Gordimer

31. “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.”

— Nadine Gordimer

32. “My answer is: Recognize yourself in others.”

— Nadine Gordimer

33. “You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.”

— Nadine Gordimer

34. “People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.”

— Nadine Gordimer

35. “It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.”

— Nadine Gordimer

36. “Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.”

— Nadine Gordimer

37. “Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.”

— Nadine Gordimer

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

— Nadine Gordimer

39. “Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.”

— Nadine Gordimer

40. “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

41. “The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.”

— Nadine Gordimer

42. “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.”

— Nadine Gordimer

43. “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

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

— Nadine Gordimer

45. “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.”

— Nadine Gordimer

46. “The desert. No seasons of bloom and decay. Just the endless turn of night and day. Out of time: and she is gazing- not over it, taken into it, for it has no measure of space, features that mark distance from here to there. In a film of haze there is no horizon, the pallor of sand, pink-traced, lilac-luminous with its own colour of faint light, has no demarcation from land to air. Sky-haze is indistinguishable from sand-haze. All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity.”

— Nadine Gordimer

47. “The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.”

— Nadine Gordimer

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

— Nadine Gordimer

49. “That night they made love, the kind of love-making that is another country, a country of its own, not yours or mine.”

— Nadine Gordimer

50. “There’s no tiling moral about beauty.”

— Nadine Gordimer