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.
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 life nadine-gordimer south-africa 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