Nadine Gordimer

Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it__ as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away.

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

To discover the exact location of a 'thing' is a simple matter of factual research. To discover the exact location of a person: where to locate the self?

You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.

I don't cry. Unfortunately, I seem rather short of tears, so my sorrows have to stay inside me.

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.

The creative act is not pure.

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

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

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

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

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

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

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

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

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.