The very aim and end of our institutions is just this that we may think what we like and say what we think.
Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
innocence power
Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.
tso-art
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?
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.
censorship imagination
The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
creativity history
Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
beauty hunger truth
I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.
tso-love
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.
effort men power progress women
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
responsibility
Time is change; we measure its passing by how much things alter
time
Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.
apartheid nadine-gordimer south-africa tso-life work writing
Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
disaster inevitability success
The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
beauty truth
Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
truth
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.
writing
The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
nadine-gordimer solitude writing
Time is something you can't replace.
life reality time
That's it on the maps; nature doesn't acknowledge frontiers. Neither can ecology... Where to begin to understand what we've only got a computerspeak label for, ? Where to decide it begins.
boundaries ecology ecosystem
The facts are always less than what really happened.
facts
People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
gifts people
Among the group of people waiting at the fortress was a schoolgirl in a brown and yellow uniform holding a green eiderdown quilt and, by the loop at its neck, a red hot-water bottle.
people
Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
people society
Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.
blackpeople people
Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
tso-art tso-life