Nadine Gordimer

From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

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.

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

Time is change; we measure its passing by how much things alter.

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

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.

I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.

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.

A desert is a place without expectation.

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

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

There is no moral authority like that of 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.

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

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