176 Quotes by Nadine Gordimer

I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.

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

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

Communists are the last optimists.

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

... 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.

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

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.

I am an African. I am white. I, in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right.