Quotes by Gordimer, Nadine

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

Gordimer, Nadine on exile   

"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."

Gordimer, Nadine on freedom   

"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."

Gordimer, Nadine on heaven   

"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."

Gordimer, Nadine on involvement   

"In a democracy -- even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-?litist one -- the greatest veneration one can show the rule of law is to keep a watch on it, and to reserve the right to judge unjust laws and the subversion of the function of the law by the power of the state. That vigilance is the most important proof of respect for the law."

Gordimer, Nadine on law and lawyers   

"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?"

Gordimer, Nadine on art   

"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."

Gordimer, Nadine on progress   

"Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity."

Gordimer, Nadine on responsibility   

"There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice."

Gordimer, Nadine on sacrifice   

"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever."

Gordimer, Nadine on censorship   

"The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful."

Gordimer, Nadine on travel   

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

Gordimer, Nadine on truth